How much App Store fun can you have for the same price as Grand Theft Auto V?

Grand Theft Auto V came out for some consoles that don't fit in your pocket today.

Here at Pocket Gamer's crime lab, though, we obviously couldn't care less. We're too busy tending our The Simpsons: Tapped Out cities.

The arrival of GTA V got us thinking, mind. Thinking about how much game-based entertainment you could get on the App Store for the 40-odd quid you're going to be spending on Rockstar's latest crime caper?

Armed with a pen and some truly terrible mental arithmetic 'skills', then, I took it upon myself to find out just how much iOS fun one GTA V is worth.

The short answer is 'some'. GTA V is worth some App Store fun. The long answer is below.

For £40, you can get three N.O.V.A. games and four Modern Combat games. Oh, and you'll still have enough cash left over to pick up Asphalt 8: Airborne, Wild Blood, and (if you don't mind going a pound or so over) the surprisingly not-rubbish The Amazing Spider-Man.

So, that's seven first-person shooters, an arcade racer, a superhero game, and a slightly dull God of War clone. Do you get all that in GTA V? Probably. But that's not the point.

For the same price as one copy of GTA V on Xbox 360, you could buy yourself and a friend 2K's brilliant sci-fi strategy battler XCOM: Enemy Unknown. And you'd have enough money left over to get both of you a cheap dinner.

So, yeah, you could play a game about murdering prostitutes, or you could solidify a friendship through gaming and food. I'm pretty sure one of those options makes you a sociopath. But, hey, it's up to you.

£40 goes a long way in Firemonkeys's free-to-play racer. You could fix your car a whole bunch of times with it, for one. You might even be able to buy a car that's faster than the one you drive in real life.

Okay, you probably won't be able to do that with 40 quid, actually. But you WILL be able to buff out all those terrible scratches you made on the bodywork when you were trying to have fun.

Not only could you grab GTA 3, GTA: Vice City, and GTA: Chinatown Wars for less than a quarter of the cash you need for GTA V on PS3, but you could also top up your violent sandbox urges with all of Gameloft's GTA-aping Gangstar series.

You'd have money left to grab Max Payne Mobile if you really wanted, too. And you could spend the change on pimping out your ride and getting some cool gang tats in real life.

Actually, you know what - don't do that.

You could buy every iOS game to which we've given a perfect score twice if you wanted to. We're a pretty discerning bunch, but that's still, like, eight games.

Included in that Platinum list are a couple of Monkey Islands, a Real Racing, a Splice, and an Anomaly Warzone Earth. And then you'll get them again. Maybe give them to a stranger on the street? Is that a thing you can do? I don't know.

So, there you go. You don't have to be a sheep and buy a particular generation-defining game just because everyone else is. You can think for yourself and do some of the things we just told you to do.

Or just buy GTA V. Which you've probably already done. You're not even reading this, are you? Hello?

I don't know why I bother.