Who would have thought that De La Soul could have got it so wrong? It seems that 3 is not the magic number at all. For me it is 60: the magic amount of Great British pennies which I am willing to spend when taking a punt on something new, throwing caution to the wind.

Luckily, there are two outlets for my oxymoronic thrifty abandon: XBox Live Indie Games (see Shoot 1-Up) and Apple’s App Store feature some super games at the bargain price point of 80MSP and 59p respectively. This week, my Star Bar fund was depleted by Rovio’s Angry Birds.

In keeping with the type of game that thrives on this platform, Angry Birds is accessibility distilled and pumped directly into your iPhone/iPod Touch. After the briefest of cut-scene explaining your plight (the pigs have stolen your eggs) you are presented with a structure housing your swine nemeses at one end of the play-field, and a catapult at the other.

The titular birds serve as the catapult’s ammunition. All you do is drag your little feathered projectile and let go to shoot him across the screen, hopefully bringing down the pigs’ ramshackle abode around their curly little tails. Kill all the pigs on one level, and it’s on to the next.

The structures and the birds themselves inject abundant variety into the gameplay. Each structure is built out of different shapes of glass, wood and rock, the properies and position of which inform how you must tackle any particular level to maximise your score. As you play through each chapter, you encounter different types of avian projectiles, further expanding the strategic possibilities: one lays an explosive egg when you tap the screen, others accelerate, or split into three. You must decide where to deploy these birds in order to exploit their full potential, as healthy bonuses are awarded at the round’s conclusion for each unused bird.

Angry Birds exudes charm thanks to its fabulous little touches. The smug, gappy grin of surviving piggies, the black-eyed grimace of a bird as he ricochets off a concrete wall – I haven’t played a game that made me chuckle so much in its opening 5 minutes for quite some time. But even after the mirth subsides, you are left with an experience that offers both immediacy and a deep challenge. An amazing package for just 60p.