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Editor's note: If you haven't played Angry Birds yet, put down your Big Mac and buy it now. If that's not enough of a recommendation, maybe Nick's article will persuade you. -Brett
Don't listen to the romantics: Money can buy happiness. And it can cost as little as 99 cents.
I found this out while camping over the weekend. My friends and I were on our way home, and we decided to stop at McDonald's. This McDonald's was bustling with people looking to get their Egg McMuffin on, so I had to wait a while for my friends to order.
I pulled out my iPod Touch and checked Facebook. Still the same people posting the same things:
"FML."
"I need only one [insert trinket] to [insert goal] in [insert game]!"
"Botched philosophical quote and/or song lyric taken out of context."
After 14 seconds of that, I decided to check out the App Store. The only apps I had downloaded at that point were Facebook, a half-assed internship seeker, and a program that lets you play around with molecules — and I only downloaded those because they were free. But now I had a dollar bill burning a hole in my cargo shorts. I could either invest in a scratch-off lottery ticket or buy a game on the App Store. After a moment of deliberation, I decided to buy a game.
I clicked on the Top 25 apps link. The first game to pop up was Angry Birds. I knew nothing about the game, but it had a five-star rating from 60,000 users — and when have that many people been wrong? I successfully downloaded the game after four tries — Apple is proud of its license agreement and wants you to read it multiple times — and started playing.
Besides the time I bought The Black Godfather on DVD, purchasing Angry Birds was the best dollar I've ever spent. It's a puzzle game in which the goal is to slingshot birds into objects in the hopes that those objects will crash into the disembodied heads of green pigs.
You're dead to me if you don't think this looks fun.
By my count, the game has approximately a shitload of levels. Honestly, it has more content than some big-budget titles.
I bought Angry Birds thinking it would be a fun distraction while I waited for my friends at Mickey D's. I ended up playing it for most of the two-hour trip home. Then I played it for an hour after that. Then I played it for two more hours yesterday.
I didn't know fun could be so inexpensive. And I certainly couldn't have predicted that a 99-cent game that I downloaded on my iPod would cut into my BioShock 2 time. Maybe I'll go back to BioShock 2 if 2K Games makes a downloadable chicken-throwing plasmid.