It seems like everyone is playing Angry Birds these days, including some of the folks right here at The Flickcast. In truth, the Star Wars variation is our favorite. . . naturally.

But Angry Birds maker Rovio isn’t resting on its laurels and is busy developing many more games for the exploding mobile gaming market. One of the next ones coming from them, in conjunction with Dreamworks Animation, is called The Croods.

We’ve got a new video explaining all the details for you today as well as this bit of info directly from Rovio:

Meet the world’s first modern family: The Croods! These cavemen are breaking out of the Stone Age with the use of a new r-evolutionary tool: the IDEA! The Croods will Hunt & Gather their way through spectacular new landscapes as they tame fantastic and never-seen-before creatures. Help The Croods survive the wild…and each other!

Check out the video after the break.

Thanks for coming back for Part 2 of The Flickcast Presents The Bitcast Best of Gaming 2012. Click here to see yesterday’s part 1 and keep coming back the rest of the week for more awards including the Game of the Year being awarded on Friday.

Most Awkward Romance – Halo 4

So thankfully we got a year off from the awkward bromance of Gears of War between Dom and Marcus as well as a lack of fistbumping from Salem and Rios in Army of Two. What we did have was a love story between a stoic soldier and the lunatic AI woman living in his head. (I know, when I put it that way it makes it sound like I have no soul.)

In Halo 4, players were able to see a true evolution in the character of Master Chief, John 117, as he began showing actual human emotions due to his connection to the AI chip that had been living in his suit with him for the better part of a decade. Like most women that a guy has lived with for that long (while he spent most of his time asleep), Cortana has started to go a little crazy.

Welcome to The Flickcast Presents the Best of Gaming 2012. This is going to be a five part series throughout this first week of 2013 concluding with the Game of the Year being awarded on Friday.

Best Use of the PlayStation Network’s Voice Chat – Journey

So any gamer who has a PS3 already knows that people with microphones don’t really exist, especially compared to the plethora of expletive spitting, homophobic prepubescents who have claimed to have slept with our mothers that troll XBox Live. What they may not know is that some of the best communication that has happened in 2012 on the PSN comes from a game that actually doesn’t even allow for voice chat.

In Journey, players are placed in the role of a robed figure who has no voice at all but can make a singing tone. Those connected to the PSN will occasionally be placed in random worlds with other players but have no method of communication other than the singing tone. This means that players are actually tasked with creating their own non-verbal communication.

Right about now, it seems like there are a few companies that have been given the license to print money. LucasArts, the men holding the rights to all things Star Wars, and Rovio, the creators of the Angry Birds franchise, are two such companies. You can’t go into a mall in America and not see something Star Wars or Angry Birds in your line of site. Imagine the power if the two were to team up. Well, on November 8th, we will get to see what that’s like with Angry Birds Star Wars.

Below, catch the teaser trailer which shows a shrouded bird holding a very special lightsaber in what is sure to be one of the fastest selling apps on iOS and the Android marketplace as soon as it launches. This will be the second time Angry Birds will tie in with another franchise, after the success of Angry Birds Rio (which was actually a logical fit considering the movie was all about birds). Instead of just adding a new set of levels though, Angry Birds Star Wars will be getting what appears to be a visual makeover like we have seen with Angry Birds Space with some teaser images of a Obi-Wan black bird, Luke Skywalker red bird or the big Chewbacca bird.

Look for the game to arrive on November 8th. Check out a trailer for it after the break.

If you’re a fan of the Angry Birds series of games for iOS and Android you might wonder where game maker Rovio goes once it runs out of places to take its signature birds and pigs. Well, wonder no more because the company today announced a new game called Amazing Alex that continues the tradition of physics-based puzzels and takes them to a whole new level.

Here’s the scoop from Rovio:

Amazing Alex has a set of 35 fully interactive objects just waiting to be set in motion. Fans can set the objects up to bounce, pop, ricochet, bash, and crash into each other and create an elaborate Rube Goldberg device! With a houseful of toys to play with, there’s more than one right answer.

Fans can share their most creative solutions with friends and see what they came up with. With 100 challenging levels across four fun-filled locations, there’s a whole world of creations to explore!

The game is available now for $0.99 in the iTunes App Store and the Google Play Store. Check out a trailer for it after the break.

Say what you will about the Angry Birds franchise of games and its relative merits, it looks like it’s here to stay. How do we know?

Well, the company that produces the series of games, Rovio, announced on Monday that the company’s latest Angry Birds installment, Angry Birds Space, has been downloaded 50 Million times in just 35 days, making it the fastest growing mobile game of all time. In the same announcement the company also hinted that “something even bigger is on its way.” What that is, we can’t imagine. The Pigs strike back perhaps? We’ll see.

If you haven’t had a chance to play Angry Birds Space yet, you should. It was released on March 22 for iOS, Android, Mac OS X and Windows so you should have no trouble finding a platform to enjoy it on. Besides, it’s quite fun to play.

In fact, we would go so far to say it’s probably the most fun of the Angry Birds franchise since the original. For more on the game, check out the video after the break.

You may not be aware of it but a series of games from Rovio about a bunch of birds angry enough at some pigs to fly over them and drop bombs shaped like eggs is doing pretty well. So well, in fact, that the original Angry Birds and its subsequent versions have sold millions of copies. In fact, there’s even making a movie about the birds.

This week the company updated its latest incarnation, Angry Birds Space, for the Android OS. With this update comes a new ice planet containing ten brand new levels. What more could you want for a Wednesday morning?

I don’t know about you but I find this game a great way to kill some time waiting in line at the post office or at the DMV. Even though some may think its over-hyped, if it provides fun and a bit of distraction, it’s a success in my book.

To get the update, or to get the game in the first place, head on over to the Google Play store and pick it up.

If you’re not a fan of launching birds into the air so they can land on and destroy pigs who’ve built castles and more, then you haven’t really lived. Angry Birds pretty much came out of nowhere and now dominates the mobile gaming space.

So, when Rovio, the makers of the game, decide to release a new version and, more to the point, make it really affordable, we take notice and bring the details to you. That’s right, today the company released Angry Birds Space for iOS and Android devices, as well as OS X and Windows PCs.

In this, the fourth major Birds release, users will get to fling birds on zero-gravity planets while utilizing new gameplay features such as slow-motion and lightspeed destruction. Sounds awesome.

“This is Rovio at its finest, and we are more than excited to bring Angry Birds Space to all our fans worldwide,” said Mikael Hed, CEO of Rovio. “This launch marks a huge step for us as a company, and our whole team and partners have really pulled together to bring out a fantastic array of exciting products and experiences.”

Angry Birds Space is available for $0.99 for the iPhone and iPod touch, with the HD version available for $2.99 on the iPad. The Mac version is available for $4.99 in the Mac App Store. The Android version is free with advertisements in the Google Play marketplace, with an ad-free versions available for $0.99 and an HD version for Android tablets available for $2.99 in the Amazon Appstore.

Click through fior the full Rovio press release and a bonus video highlighting aspects of the game.

Angry Birds can rightfully be classified as a phenomenon. Between the countless downloads and the merchandise that sells like gangbusters the game has reached the top pop culture status.

Rovio likes to keep the game fresh, with constant seasonal updates and other new level packs to keep the fans coming back for more. While these updates do present some minor new additions to the Angry Birds experience, there hasn’t been any major advance in the game play since day one.

That is all changing with the impending release of Angry Birds Space, the next installment in the series, and the first to revolutionize it’s game play. Space will showcase gravity free physics, and force players adjust while sending their mad avian buddies through small gravity fields set up around the environment.

Up until now the game play was a bit of a mystery, it was hard to imagine what that meant compared to the standard Angry Birds action. With the help of an astronaut, actually in space no less, Rovio has revealed exactly how this new physics will work in your pig hunting adventures.

Beyond the massive cool factor of having an actual space inhabiting astronaut play with Angry Birds plushes to demonstrate gravity free physics, the game play on display in this new video is awesome. We can’t wait to get our hands on Angry Birds Space when it is launched March 22nd.

Check out the physics showcase video after the jump.

JC and WallE are back with the 7th epic edition of the Bitcast. In the News of the Week, the two discuss the announcement of the PlayStation 3 Smash Brothers inspired brawler Title Fight and the characters that may be coming to it. They also talk about a recent study that links violent video games to slower brain activity. Finally, they look at how Angry Birds developer Rovio passed on a $2.25 billion dollar offer from social media games developer Zynga who incidentally lost almost a million players in their game Mafia Wars 2 in just one month.

In the second edition of The Long Grind featuring The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, JC discusses the story (spoiler free) and the open world adventuring aspects of the game.

In this week’s Topic of the Week, social media in gaming such as Facebook integration and community sites like Raptr are brought up. Finally, in Now Playing, JC gives some more insight into his longer than expected play sessions on Saints Row: The Third and WallE discusses his review of Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3.

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