Best of the Mac App Store

The Inevitable iPhone Port Onslaught

No, that's not a game, but it probably ought to be. Scanning the Mac App Store, it's pretty obvious that certain savvy and/or money-hungry developers have spied an opportunity to port over their iTunes best-sellers on the assumption that plenty of people out there will fancy playing them on their MacBook on the move, or perhaps even their impossibly gigantic iMacs. Takes all sorts.

Top of the pile, obviously, is the insanely popular Angry Birds, which is, completely unshockingly, exactly the same only with more pixels and a £2.99 price tag for the privilege. Similarly ubiquitous and similarly £2.99, Flight Control also makes an appearance and is, again, a solid, unremarkable port of a game that only really works if you can plot the landing paths with your own fingers. The beautiful and entrancing rope twister Zen Bound 2 is also £2.99, and well worth picking up if you've missed out, while the 59p cutesy puzzler Toki Tori actually manages to be a third of the price that you can currently pick it up on iPhone for. No-one said it had to make any sense.

Elsewhere in iOS port land, we find the beautiful, enjoyable puzzler Ancient Frog still worthy of the £2.99 price tag – mainly because, unlike most of the other iOS games here, it's not arbitrarily five times the price. Sadly, the lovably bonkers avoid-'em-up The Incident is, at £1.79, about 50 per cent more expensive, but given that it's still cheap we won't prattle on about it too much. The bloody brilliant Pinball HD has also gone out at £1.79. Buy the iPhone or iPad version as well for 59p, and play the best pinball sim around for bugger all.

Meanwhile, in adventure land, the folks at Argharta Studios haven't quite figured out that £4.99 is probably too much for the interesting-but-not-brilliant 1112, and it's the same deal with Anuman's pretty average Dracula Series, which is going out at £5.49 for each of the three parts, as opposed to a sum total of £1.78 for the entire series on iPad. Hmm. And if you haven't meddled with Hothead's Precipice Of Darkness RPG series, you might be tempted at a mere £1.79 a pop.

In terms of the bigger, full-priced releases, there's pretty much sod all around right now, though we suspect that will change in the fullness of time. For the time being, Civilization V looks like a bargain at £17.99 (against its £29.99 price on Steam right now) [Correction: Kristan is an idiot, it's Civ IV: Colonization, not Civ V, and it's cheaper on Steam -Ed.], though you wonder who would pay £29.99 for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare three years on from release. The thoroughly excellent Bejeweled 3 also looks like a steal at £11.99 (Steam price £14.99), though hideously addictive match-three RPG hybrid Puzzle Quest finds itself in the rare position of being more expensive on the Mac App Store at £8.99, versus £5.99 on Steam. Funny old game, prices.