Slingshot Cowboy Plus is a quirky little app for the iPod Touch (and iPhone). The premise is that the cows have gone mad and you need to round them up. Hit them three times with a missile from your magic slingshot, and they go right on their backs — hooves in the air.

There’s not really an explanation for why the cows have gone mad. I have a few theories of my own: They are tired of being the target of choice for alien probing and they’re not going to take it anymore; they ate some bad sushi and are walking it off; or they’re really pissed off that someone is chasing them across the countryside with a slingshot. Those dang missiles hurt!

In any case, it’s you and the cows and the wide open country (and a gopher). It’s your job to bring those cows back in line.

The slingshot is one of those models that you’d see hanging out of the back pocket of Huck Finn — not the type used by David against Goliath. You draw back on the stretchy part with your finger to pull it back, move it side to side to aim, and release to let fly. On top of that, you change your angle of attack by tilting the iPod itself back and forth — which I think is really cool.

Initially the cows are in a wide open area, but that quickly changes as you move up through the levels. You’ll get more and more obstacles in your way and will need to improve your aim and timing accordingly. I was happy to find that there is a helper for those of us lacking accuracy. You can touch the laser option and a little red dotted line shows you the arc of your projectile. Sure, you get fewer points this way, but in my case, fewer are better than the none I was getting by just eyeballing it. If you get your confidence (and aim) going, you can tap laser at any time to toggle it off.

In addition to the cows, you have one more living target — the gopher. Visions of Caddyshack dance in my head. All that’s missing is the song. You’ll get a warning before a gopher incursion. The gopher pops up somewhere random on the screen. If you can hit him before he disappears (you have a couple of seconds), you’ll get a random buff. Sometimes you get extra time on the clock. Sometimes you get a score multiplier. My favorite so far though is the grenade buff. Get this one and the next three missiles from your slingshot are grenades. I love lobbing one into a group of the cows and getting all those little hoofies pointing at the sky. The grenade takes only one hit to fell a mad cow, and it can get every cow in the immediate vicinity. Yeehaw!

There are three modes of play: practice, classic and timed race. Practice just lets you get the hang of the slingshot. I obviously could have used more practice time, but I was impatient to start.

Classic mode kicked my butt. You only have so much time to knock down all of the cows on each level. Given my accuracy never got much above 30 percent, I never did get past level one in this mode.

I am having a ton of fun in the timed race mode. Sure my accuracy sucks and it takes me forever to clear the level, but I’m having a great time playing. I don’t really care about my score at this point — I just love lobbing those missiles.

Slingshot Cowboy Plus isn’t terribly deep as games go, and P.E.T.A. would probably be outraged, but I think it’s just right for a quickie game to play on the iPod on the go. And for $.99, it's worth the cost. Moo, baby!