I don't seem to recall which site I found this game on - more than likely it was some foreign bootleg of Miniclip and looking for the game I played and the site itself through my search history doesn't yield a thing. It's like it got completely wiped from existence. The only proof I have of this is screenshots now.
Either way, I had been sent the site by a friend who loved that kind of weird, poorly-translated video game slop. The game was titled "ANGRY BIRDS UNBLOCKED FREE IN ENGLISH," and the icon on the site was a bizarre Photoshop which I have attached.
Something about this image unnerves me, and it did even before knowing what I know now about the game: it just looks off. Every time I look at it I feel the weird bootleg Red staring straight back at me and I get the chills- but maybe that's just the following events talking.
The description of the game read as follows: "Angry Birds is a fighting game based on Angry Birds and Pigs. Destroying bridges with wolf soldiers will earn you more points." I can only assume the "wolf soldiers" and "bridges" is some kind of bizarre mistranslation of the structures the pigs build, but that wasn't even close to the strangest thing I found while playing this game.
The game itself was an extremely sloppy clone of Angry Birds, made with some video game engine I can't even take a guess at the inner workings of. The slingshot- which was cut out very poorly from a black-background image- was stiff and didn't launch on certain angles, seemingly picked at random every level. The birds themselves had strangely inconsistent launch patterns, even taking into account their abilities, and you basically had to memorize how each bird launched and how they interacted with the slingshot to beat the incredibly base-level constructions in each level. The sounds were bit-crushed and sounded like they came out of a Happy Meal toy, and the music varied heavily in quality. Each level only had 5 stages, and it only went to Ham 'Em High- the 5th level of the original game- making a total of 25 stages. Each introduced a new bird, and also some bizarre text, almost like a credits sequence, capped off each one.
The first was Red, obviously. His sprite was only minorly changed and he functioned like a standard bird- well, standard as could be described in this game, anyways. There is literally nothing of value to say about these levels- they just played like a worse version of Angry Birds, with the first level layout even directly taken from the first level of Angry Birds. The background was a slightly compressed version of the same background used in the game icon and the music was what sounded like a piano cover of the title screen theme of Angry Birds- kind of like the YouTube channel Sheet Music Boss.
After I finished the set of 5 levels, this image of Red celebrating with text on top appeared on screen.
What a bizarre mishmash of words- evidently the person who made this game didn't speak English as their first language. Hey, at least they were trying.
The next level introduced Chuck, who had some kind of bilinear filter blur on him- I can only assume to make him look "fast." When you clicked the screen after launching him he would zip off directly in a horizontal line instead of carrying his momentum in an arc like in the actual game. This lead to some interesting levels, but overall he was clunky and annoying to control. The background was a random shot at night from Angry Birds Seasons and the music was Egg Defender from the original game, but pitch shifted into a melody that sounds very familiar- I can't quite place it even now, though. It kind of sounded like "Way Back Then" from Squid Game, though.
After this level was a weird piece of overly realistic Chuck fanart (which I managed to trace down to the source- Loveless-Nights on DeviantArt) and another caption.
Second verse, same as the first- but I remember the phrase "You will never forget bird" sticking out to me at the time. It felt oddly sinister.
After this was Bomb, and this was when the levels started getting weird. Bomb was completely faceless and, when clicking on the screen after launching, stopped the entire game to play a giant explosion PNG over whatever segment of the screen Bomb was over.
This basically completely trivialized the level- as soon as you had Bomb you could just fling him over the top of the screen and then click right in the middle of whatever contraption the pigs had built, then send in the other birds to deal with the stragglers. The music sounded like some stock "army" music in this level and the background was a random background from the cartoon.
The text this time was weird. The image was just a stretched out render of the faceless Bomb from the game and the text read like this:
However, after a few seconds, the render glitched out like a CRT television, and now the text instead read this, with the image of Bomb in the background twitching:
OK, this was officially getting ominous. Everything else earlier was strange in a charming, wonky way. This was moreso "maybe the game I'm playing is cursed" levels.
Well, I didn't jump to that immediately- I obviously assumed it was some kind of weird joke that didn't translate very well.
The next level introduced the Blues, in an incredibly grotesque manner. The Blues were all sort of melded together like a melty candy bar and their gimmick worked more like Matilda's than the original bird- clicking the screen dispatched one of the three to home in on the nearest pig through the structure with a sickening ripping and popping sound- like a bone being ripped out of its socket.
The background now was just a completely black void, and the music was the strangest of the lot. It sounded like an old recording of some French guy making bird noises with his mouth, repeating the phrase "A ya ya ya."
When I finished these levels, I swear to god, there was a picture of a corpse instead of the Blues. It didn’t look quite like a real corpse but it was just in that sweet spot in the uncanny valley between real and fake to make me literally jump out of my seat.
The same alternating text occurred on this screen too. The first:
And the second:
I felt physically sick after playing that level, but thankfully the rest of the game wasn’t as outwardly gross- although it was incredibly ominous.
The final bird was Matilda, who, like the Blues, looked very different- she was using her “damaged” sprite after she flies into a wall, one of her eyes was slightly larger than the other, and the other eye seemed to have a blood vessel pop in it, with a border of red surrounding the pupil.
Every time Matilda touched a pig it would instantaneously disappear, and she quickly cleared through blocks, making the final area a breeze- but I still did get too close for comfort a number of times due to how shaken I was at the game’s content at this point.
The background here was a photorealistic image of a nesting bird, and the music was loud, ominous humming- like a fan left on full blast in an empty room.
At this point in the game the pigs were scattered around the screen with little to no blocks, like they were rushing to make the game for some reason or another.
The last part of the game didn’t have a picture- it was a full blown video. I took a screen recording of it, and it's captured below- it lost the first few seconds but it had no text and it was basically just the person running as they do in the rest of the video anyways.
For those who can't see the video, here is a summary:
Someone was filming themselves in black and white, running through a forest in a panic, as the text scrolled on screen and loud birdcalls sounded throughout the forest. The text showed up on screen in slides.
“Follow the bird's calls.”
“You will locate a bird! A ya ya ya!”
“This bird is not a bird. It is the bird.”
“Fingerprints belonging to businessman ‘Avery B. Terrance’ were located near the workplace of a person who had contracted the disease.”
“Avery was tracked down in a different state having no memory of the last 72 hours.”
There was a significant pause before the video feed cut out and the final text of the game faded on screen.
“This is not bird behavior, after all.”
The video suddenly cut out, and the screen was replaced with an image of what looked like a mugshot of a man in his mid-to-late 30s with a black box over his eyes. The Red Bird was sloppily edited into the photo looking directly at the man from the bottom right corner, and the whole thing was monochrome. Slapped over the image was the phrase, in the Angry Birds font, “THANK YOU FOR PLAYING!”
The game then abruptly cut back to the title screen like nothing happened after this.
I’ve spent my fair share of time looking into just what the hell was discussed in this game. I hadn't been able to find records of any Avery B. Terrance, especially not in the Detroit area, but I was able to find exactly one YouTube video dated fairly recently, containing a news report snippet about an issue with diseased birds in Detroit. It’s gone now- taken down with a channel that apparently violated community guidelines- but the long and short of it was that crazed, seemingly sick birds had swooped into urban centers in the Detroit area and attacked random people, biting and pecking at them until they were tranquilized by animal control and investigated at a nearby hospital- strangely, the tranquilizer chemicals immediately killed them, and once a few specimens were killed and examined, the problem stopped occurring.
It wasn’t known what made the birds so… well, angry, but the person presenting the news said something right before the video cut out that haunted me.
“Law enforcement is looking into potential links between these infected birds and the recent disappearance of the owner of Terrance Telecommunications.”
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Author's Notes:
This one's based on something made by a friend of a friend- it's an odd one, and I've lifted pretty much the entire text to use on the victory screens.
A bit more experimental, and my first use of images! Spooky!.
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