When you first mentioned
http://www.angrybirdsnow.com/ this website, you'll notice this is a PR4 site with decent backlinks, if you are trying to outrank him with the same keyword and same theme, it will be a lot harder than using a rich content site with different theme.
The site has a lot of backlinks:
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=angrybirdsnow.com&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=s That's about 7K backlinks in yahoo explorer, usually it takes double the resources to out rank that site because many backlinks will not show in yahoo explorer.
I have pinged thousands of backlinks without proxies, and my site(s) never had a problem. As long as you spread them over the weeks evenly, I don't think there will be any problem.
Nuclear Link Indexer / Crawler is a backlink indexing / crawling service that serve the same purpose of notifying Google to get credit for the backlinks, and it doesn't matter if you use the service or NPS, I think you should start trying this:
1. Remove Adsense for the moment
2. Add sitemap and submit to Google Webmaster Tool
3. Start building backlinks from Authority sites only, preferable backlinks from domain PR5+, or edu / gov backlinks, at this stage, you need trustrank for your site.
4. After creating those authority backlinks, ping or index them (Prefer indexing as they are quality backlinks)
5. Continue to build more backlinks to inner and home page, spread them 50/50
6. Crawl or indexing those backlinks
Track your keyword ranking using rankerizer (Free) or the rank tracker service in Nuclear Link Indexer (beta now), track your keywords movement and continue to build more backlinks until you reach page 1.
If you can add more content and change the theme, I think you'll see much obvious progress. I do agree that if you continue to build more backlinks, eventually your site may outrank the original site, but usually it is very difficult.
I hope this make sense..