Flock Together: Free PC Angry Birds

Angry Birds is a catapult game that has proven quite successful on mobile telephones. In other news, Elvis Presley sold some records, chocolate tastes quite good and Star Wars offered positive licensing opportunities.

The PC version of Rovio’s bland but compulsive one-button physics puzzler perhaps hasn’t proved quite so much a phenonemon, but that’s probably got something to do with being far more expensive than the eyeTelephone and (free) Android versions. For a limited period, this imbalance is addressed – you can grab the game for free.

You’re required to install Intel’s AppUp Center, which is the chip-lord’s attempt at a PC app store. The wrinkle is that you have to do it via Best Buy’s website (it remains free and Best Buy don’t get your details, don’t worry) and, during installation, claim to be in the US rather than wherever you actually live. If you already have the AppUp Center installed, you’ll need to remove it and start again, as far as I can tell.

You then need to register an account once the App Center’s installed, which is just yer standard email address/password fandango. I then had to restart the App Center. With that, the $4.99 Angry Birds fee was waived. Hooray. Hooray for throwing birds at pigs again and again and again and again and again.

I’m not an enormous fan of the game itself (give me Crush the Castle instead any day), but I must say the HD PC version is really, really good-looking. I might even end up playing it a bit.