There are games, and there are brands, and there are games that become brands. Angry Birds is one of those, and Bad Piggies Best Egg Recipes is the latest iOS Angry product to emerge from studio Rovio. It’s not a game. It’s a cookbook for iPad. Not an ordinary cookbook: this one’s just about eggs.
Enclosed within are 41 eggy recipes. Not just ways of cooking eggs, although there are plenty of those, but ways of cooking other things with eggs. Cheesecake, waffles, hollandaise sauce, chilli pepper casserole, even an eggy burger: you name it, there’s something here that’s vaguely like it.
In the best Angry Birds tradition, there’s a lot of sound too. Birdy background music plays, along with non-stop piggy sound fx. All manner of snorting, gurgling, glugging and belching. It’s enough to put you off your food for the evening.
Is it little more than an advert for the separate Bad Piggies game? Well, yes and no. I mean, the branding and everything is pretty overt: look folks, here’s the Bad Piggies game, and here’s the Bad Piggies recipe book. Collect the set!
But cynicism aside, some effort has gone into selecting a decently varied mishmash of ideas here, and into presenting them well.
Each recipe is illustrated with several photos of the food being made. The Grilled Eggs, for example, should be done over an open fire for best results, says the recipe. And sure enough, the photos show that someone built a fire and grilled some eggs over it. Some recipe books (both printed and electronic) go to great lengths to dress up the food photos and make them look good, to the point where they start to look artificial. But here, the food looks real, and looks much tastier as a result. Although I first checked this app out shortly after eating my lunch, it got me feeling hungry pretty fast. And in a book of receipes, that’s a good thing.
So although you can point to this and call it a cynical marketing exercise, at least it’s a cynical marketing exercise that’s been made with some love and care. If you do decide to spend your money buying this app, you won’t feel cheated. There’s easily a dollar’s worth of eggs here. That’s the sale price, so grab the app now if you like the sound of it. The price will rise to five bucks soon.
Generally, though, I’d say this is only a must-buy for Angry Birds completists and egg aficionados. Everyone else is probably better off just using the web to find egg recipes.
Source: App Store
