Amazing Alex Franchise game is being launched by the great Angry Birds game maker Rovio. Amazing Alex’s performance will be closely watched after the firm’s earlier series racked up more than one billion downloads. Its gameplay is like to arrange objects on screen to create a chain reaction in which each piece of the puzzle has an effect on another until the goal is achieved.
Unlike Rovio’s other games, Amazing Alex began its life outside the Finnish firm. It was originally known as Casey’s Contraptions, a physics-based game in which players had to help the lead character free his toys.
It was released in 2011 by Noel Llopis, a California-based independent game developer, and the Washington-headquartered games studio Mystery Coconut. It received positive reviews which compared the tasks involved to the outlandish machines drawn by the cartoonist Heath Robinson and the ad-hoc inventions of the 1980s television show MacGyver.
However, the title never became a hit and the developers sold their intellectual property rights to Rovio earlier this year, following which it was removed from Apple’s iOS store. Rovio chose to adapt an existing title rather than build a new game from scratch Rovio has given the graphics and gameplay a tweak and has now re-released it on both the iOS and Android platforms. The firm’s Twitter feed confirmed that versions for PCs, Macs and Windows Phone handsets would follow.
The company has tried to generate excitement for the release by featuring a prominent tease in its Angry Birds Seasons game which it offered as a free download to iPhone and iPad owners for a limited time. However, one mobile games analyst said it was too soon to know if the move would pay off.
Mr Kent said Rovio’s expertise in this area meant similar efforts were likely to follow Amazing Alex if it proved popular. But Rovio is not solely focusing its efforts on the new title. It has told the gaming website IGN that it had teamed up with the publisher Activision to release its first three Angry Birds titles as a bundled package for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Nintendo 3DS later this year. It said the versions for Sony and Microsoft’s devices could be controlled via the Move and Kinect motion sensors.
