After Angry Birds Now Play Angry Brides, A Game Against Dowry In India

Matrimonial site Shaadi.com has launched 'Angry Brides', a game to create awareness and showcase the company's stand against the social evil of dowry, joining the list of Indian firms who have been quick to reverse engineer the success of the addictive game Angry Birds to local issues.

Angry Brides comes after another technology start-up Geek Mentors Studio developed an online game on the lines of Angry Birds and named it aptly Angry Anna (more about that here). As you may have guessed, the birds of the original game were replaced by animated look-alikes of Anna Hazare, Baba Ramdev and Kiran Bedi while the pigs were replaced with faces of politicians. That game was launched when the Lokpal issue was live.

In case of Angry Brides, the game has been conceptualised, designed and developed in-house by the Shaadi.com team and it was launched on the company's Facebook page. Although the game play of is not even closely related to Angry Birds, there is no denying the fact that the company wants to benefit from the similarity between the two names.

For playing the game, users need to be login to their account and then provide the application access to their email address and their relationship status (so don't be surprised if you receive a promotional email from Shaadi.com- that is if you are unmarried).

Although the app's activity is not added to the user's Facebook page and the game functionality is very simple. The game involves grooms (3 to begin with) with a heavy dowry price tag. The player or the bride has to strike the grooms with a weapon of choice (ranging from a tomato, shoes, high heeled sandals to a broom or an egg, among others) while grooms continue to try and dodge the weapon. Users can decide the power with which they hurl the weapons on their chosen target.

Each hit decreases the price of the groom and adds the money saved to the player's 'anti-dowry fund' while each miss results in a girl cartoon making fun of you with remarks like 'Do you even know what you are doing??' and 'Give up. Go to bed'. Also, there is an anti-dowry fund target that players have to reach in every level and that too within a time limit. The users get a total of three lives before being prompted to play again.

We cannot tell you exactly how many levels are there in the game since we couldn't cross level 2 (we must be very bad at it) but players can choose to either publish their scores or in this case anti-dowry fund on their Facebook wall or tweet it to their timeline.

Ram Bhamidi, Senior VP & Head of Online Marketing, Shaadi.com said, "The Angry Brides game is our way of throwing a spotlight on the nuisance of dowry. According to a 2007 study by NCRB, there is a dowry-related death every 4 hours in India."

You can play the Angry Brides by clicking on the link https://www.facebook.com/shaadicom.