When I were a lad, a new computer game didn’t cost the same as a tank of petrol. I remember eagerly scanning the shelves of my local WH Smith, hoping to find a new release among the stacks of Commodore 64 tapes priced at £2.99. If I hadn’t given my mum too much lip that week, I might even have been able to persuade her to part with £3.99 for one of the premium titles, such as The Way of the Exploding Fist.

The era of the low-budget game pretty much died with the Commodore 64, Spectrum and Amstrad era. Before long the Amiga and the Atari ST had raised the budget bar to £9.99 – not so much an impulse purchase, as a couple of weeks pocket money at the very least.

Yet, that was nothing compared to the inflation of the console era. New PlayStation titles routinely cost £30. Today, a brand new Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 title can set you back £50. I sympathise with the parents I see dragging their disappointed offspring away from the game aisles in Tesco, explaining they simply can’t afford the latest releases. For my mum it was a couple quid on top of her copy of the Daily Mail and Woman’s Weekly; for today’s mums it’s almost as much as the weekly shopping bill.

However, one recent breakthrough has renewed hope of a return to the “golden age of gaming” – and it comes in the unlikely form of the iPhone. The iPhone Apps store is selling low-budget games by the bucketload, many of them far cheaper than the £2.99 bargains I was plucking out of Smiths in 1985. The Guardian’s superb games reviewer Nick Gillett picked his top 10 iPhone games at the weekend, and no fewer than four of them cost only 59p. The most expensive on his list is Beatmaker at £11.99, but that’s the only one more expensive than £2.99.

I don’t own an iPhone, but my brother-in-law does. Every time we see him, my four-year-old daughter sidles up to him and asks if she can have a go on Flight Control, a ridiculously addictive game where you take on the role of an air-traffic controller, bringing planes in to land and sending them on their merry way again. It’s about a million times better than I make it sound.

Yes, I know the iPhone hardware’s expensive, but so was the Commodore 64 (my dad paid £399 for ours).  And given the choice of forking out 59p to keep my daughter entertained with a new game every week, instead of £40 or £50 on the Wii or Xbox 360, I know which one I’ll be going for.