TechRadar reports that Angry Birds is to get a new Mighty Eagle character. Available only as an in-app purchase, it changes your weapon to a sardine tin, which upon landing causes a gigantic eagle to come down and obliterate everything. Rovio argues that this will aid users who cannot get past certain levels.

Since Angry Birds has several difficultly walls—levels that abruptly require an insane level of precision to complete, despite being surrounded by far more forgiving ones—adding a paid-for cheat is a pretty loathsome tactic. It’s a band-aid to cover up for poor level design and a rather cynical way of generating revenue (rather than adding value with extra levels, which would be worth 59p).

Still, at least Rovio hasn’t broken Angry Birds in terms of scoring. Using the eagle doesn’t enable you to get a full three-star quota for the level it’s used on. Compare this to Bejeweled Blitz, totally ruined by PopCap when it added ‘boosts’ that can be bought using Facebook credits. With these, PopCap rendered its online high-score tables largely irrelevant, since players no longer start on an even playing field. It’s the rough equivalent of pitching two Pac-Man players against each other, only in one case a player’s yellow dot-muncher is accompanied by the Ghostbusters and a priest. Here’s hoping Rovio stamps on the brakes regarding ‘cheats’ before Angry Birds suffers the same fate.

Register Hardware reports that Vue has gone totally batshit bonkers and is contemplating banning mobile phones from its cinemas. At present, says the article, Vue “forbids punters from taking ‘sound and video recording equipment’ into the auditorium. Vue reserves the right to search visitors to prevent them from sneaking such kit in”, and may, presumably, smother them with extortionately expensive popcorn if they fail to comply.

Currently, Vue bans video-recorders, but also, somewhat oddly, laptops and tablets like the iPad—which conspicuously lacks a camera of any kind. Worryingly, a bloke from the linked article who recently visited Leeds Vue was told that “staff should have confiscated his iPad and camera too, for the duration of the showing”.

OK, two things. First, there’s no way in hell I’d trust a Vue employee with my iPhone or any other electronic kit, and I suspect Vue’s terms would be such that you’d leave your device(s) with them at your own risk. Similarly, I won’t leave my iPhone in my car, because I’m not fucking stupid. But I also won’t leave it at home, because, you know, having a mobile phone on you when you’re driving about in a tin-can with wheels is handy for when the tin-can suddenly decides it doesn’t want to go any further while you’re surrounded by picturesque fields and a distinct lack of housing and telephone boxes.

Secondly—and this bit is quite important—I really wish cinema chains would shut the hell up regarding people recording films. I recently saw Scott Pilgrim and had to sit through yet another patronising piece of tosh where some actor or other told me that ‘camcordering’ (hrng) films is ILLEGAL and BAD and EVIL and stuff. I know. I just spent an inordinate amount of money on two tickets to see said film. GO AWAY! And the fact remains that the vast majority of bootlegs are from promo/preview discs that subsequently circulate—the days of someone downloading a film recorded by some muppet at the back of a cinema are mostly long gone.

If Vue thinks extending its ban or policing it more thoroughly, removing iPhones and similar kit from punters, will help it in any way or protect the film industry, it’s sadly deluded. If someone is stupid enough to start recording a film on their smartphone, fine, kick them out of the screening; but don’t ban the rest of us from entering the screen in the first place. If you do, you’ll suddenly find quite a lot of people won’t bother visiting the cinema at all; and far from protecting the film industry, a chunk of those tech-aware people might suddenly be more drawn to torrenting preview discs.

The Macalope‘s latest column for Macworld nicely sums up why people are so boneheadedly wrong with the whole ‘Android is Microsoft in the mobile wars’ thing:

Everyone wants to compare the Apple/Google mobile OS wars to the Apple/Microsoft desktop wars of the 1990s. But if Compaq ever got out of line, Microsoft always told them to go jump in a proverbial lake. And then it pushed them in an actual lake. Filled with sharks. A special breed of freshwater great white sharks that the company had genetically engineered for that particular purpose. And then it poured petroleum into the lake and lit it on fire.

He argues that Google being ‘forced’ by operators to do things like make Bing (instead of Google) the default (and sometimes impossible to change) search engine means Google’s a world away from Microsoft; it also highlights that Google has significantly less leverage than Microsoft had over PC vendors before mobile became so astonishingly important.

I’d add that it also seems that Google appears to have less leverage than Apple in this space. Can you imagine a carrier forcing Apple to install apps that can’t be deleted, or telling Apple to use Bing for search and also remove Google and Yahoo? Rumours at the moment reckon this is precisely what’s going to happen with a Verizon iPhone in the USA; frankly, I think hell will freeze over first. To that end, one might argue that the company closest to playing the role of Microsoft in the mobile wars is Apple.

So I just installed iOS 4.1 on my iPhone and started farting about with Game Center. Like Ping, it does make me wonder if Apple understands that when it comes to social networking, it’s best not to avoid the ‘social’ and ‘networking’ bits.

The good

Game Center has a pretty straightforward interface that shows up the likes of OpenFeint as being even more of a mess than you originally thought they were. I can take or leave (well, if I’m honest, leave; well, if I’m really honest, set fire to) the casino-like gambling table green-fuzz and wood visual appearance, but at least the navigation is fine.

The bad and the bonkers

In the case of Game Center, ‘the bad’ and ‘the bonkers’ are both the same thing. Currently, most of my social gaming happens on Facebook, but via iOS games that happily connect to my Facebook account. I sign in, and immediately I have an arcade-game-style high-score table, populated with my friends’ scores. It’s great, and it’s simple (one click and a sign-in).

Because Apple hates relying on others, it’s eschewed this approach, instead forcing you to go through a protracted set-up to get your Apple ID talking to Game Center, followed by an invite system that’s either by known username or by email (seriously).

The modern web and online services are entirely based around networking, and are successful when these services all talk to each-other. By sealing itself off from the rest of the world and existing social networking (be it Facebook, Twitter or other services), Game Center irks. I don’t doubt it’ll be a success—there are too many iOS gamers and excited developers for it not to be. But it is awkward, unwieldy and unnecessarily time-consuming to deal with, and these are direct opposites to the things Apple has historically been known for.

Update: Game Center also cunningly provides usernames only with friend requests. I’ve already had a request from someone who I’ve no idea who they are. Gnh.

Update 2: ‘The Rev’ writes in the comments: “It’d be nice if it worked, too – the Flight Control leaderboard is showing my first score today, not the better score from my next attempt and not my best score from before Game Center launched.” Oh dear. Follow-up-o-tron: “It’s actually my FIRST since GC – not best since. I’ve done better today and it’s not uploaded. Other people okay, though.” Fire up the Bug Kill Machine, Walter!

I’ve just spent a happy half-hour reading through the entirety of The iPad Project over on Fraser Speirs’s blog. Amusing that at the end of day one, the kids had already figured out how to make mischief with their new devices:

We installed a drawing app – I forget which one but it might have been Doodle Buddy – that allows kids to collaborate on drawings over the network. The kids were fiddling around with this app when there was a knock on the door. “Errm….Mr Speirs? Are your children doing something to my class’s iPads?”

Turns out some kids had been joining shared whiteboards on iPads in the other classroom. Hilarity ensued, of course.