A little while back I posted about Spirit, a new game for the iPhone and iPod Touch created by Marco Mazzoli and you all rushed out (well, tapped your way to the Appstore) and bought it. Right? You did, right? It’s still only $0.99/£0.59p, a bargain for such a great game. Of course you did – you’d need to be some kind of freakishly drab ne’er-do-well, tighter than a duck’s chuff whose mere existence is a blight on all creation not to have snapped such a slick and entertaining game up at that price.

And now you have even fewer reasons to hold off purchasing this top title as just the other week Marco released version v1.1 of Spirit, introducing the much anticipated OpenFeint integration, adding a new ‘Extreme’ difficulty mode, tweaking gameplay and smoothing out some kinks under the hood.

The OpenFeint feature adds online leaderboards meaning, if you’re like me, you can now quantify how horrifically bad at the game you truly are. If however you’re vaguely competent, you’ll enjoy measuring up against all your friends (you did get your friends to buy the game too, right?) and rubbing their faces in your sheer excellence.

The Extreme difficulty mode kicks off right from 1-1 with a full board of busy enemies who appear to have been hitting the Red Bull all night. Everything is quicker and more aggressive and again, if you’re like me, your ass will get handed to you in very short order. But, if you like a challenge and want to prove your legendary gaming prowess, getting to the top of the Extreme leaderboard would certainly go some way towards doing so.

The update is of course free so everyone smart enough to have snapped the game up already can enjoy these new features simply by visiting the Appstore again. Everyone else, buy the game. Now!