Finally, hang out with your Android buddies in Hanging With Friends

It looks like Tuesday is unofficially Zynga Game Day, as the company just announced that Hanging With Friends is now available for free on the Android Market. Keep in mind, this comes just minutes after the company revealed Mafia Wars 2. Even better news than the fact that Android players can get in on Zynga With Friends's second mobile game is that it's now cross-platform ready.

Yes, now you can play both your iPhone-toting friends and your best Android-owning enemies buds in this crazy take on the classic pen and paper game of Hangman. In case you're unfamiliar, Hanging With Friends takes the popular turn-based exchange of the wildly popular Words With Friends and applies that to a wacky game of Hangman, but with some twists.

For one, players who choose their word for an opponent are limited by the letters provided to them. Then, that challenge is sent to a player who must guess the word with a limited amount of guesses. This exchange of posing challenges and guesses continues asynchronously until one player loses all of their balloons and falls into a pit of lava or other various deathtraps.

Luckily, you have a series of power-ups at your disposal that can restore some of your guesses or reveal letters that may or may not be part of the word your friend chose in secret. Of course, these boosts cost Coins, which you can accumulate over time by winning Hanging With Friends matches or purchasing them outright in-game.
Gallery: Hanging With Friends on Android
Of course, the Android version contains all of the features that its iOS counterpart sports, like the ability to play up to 20 games at a time, in-game chat and push notifications. Finally, you can add friends via your existing With Friends account, or just connect to Facebook (like everyone else) to find more folks to crush with your wordsmithery. Have at thee, Fandroids.

Click here to download Hanging With Friends on the Android Market Now >

Are you psyched that Hanging With Friends has finally come to Android? What other Zynga games do you hope to see on Android phones on the future?

'Twas a very merry Angry Birds Christmas, with 6.5 million downloads

You could also say that a lot of folks scored some sweet gadgets this holiday season. Finnish game maker Rovio told AllThingsD that its ubiquitous Angry Birds game had been downloaded 6.5 million times on Christmas Day. (The website points out that this is nearly the estimated amount of smartphones activated over the holiday.) Yup, Angry Birds is still cool.

"We're really excited to have such a massive number of new people get acquainted with Angry Birds over the holidays--we have exciting new releases lined up for 2012, and can't wait to introduce them to the public," Rovio's Ville Heijari told AllThingsD. The 6.5 million mark combines all paid and free downloads of the three Angry Birds games, and across all platforms, we imagine.

According to AllThingsD, this more than triples Angry Birds' downloads for Christmas 2010. Surely, that's helped by an extra Angry Birds release, but we bet there are a number of reasons why the game's downloads skyrocketed this Christmas. Between air time on several commercials, their visages on every damned t-shirt in Hot Topic and appearances at major cultural events, Angry Birds exposure hit a fever pitch in 2011.

We're also wiling to bet that this is far from the end for the irate avian creatures. More, unique Angry Birds games are reportedly in the works for 2012, and we're still a ways off from that feature film. So, don't expect these furious, flightless (sort of) foul to go away anytime soon.