Hello there. It's Monday. And we all know what that means around these parts. It's time to have a ruminate about one of the big things that's happened to mobile gaming in the past 7 days. But what shall we talk about today team?
Well, I think it's only right that we have a ponder on the concept of the mobile remastering. After all, Gameloft has announced that it's going to release a spruced up version of its sort-of-classic Halo-aping shooter NOVA.
The game is going to be called NOVA Legacy (sorry, I'm not putting all those dots in its name, and let's be honest you're not going to be doing that when you're searching for information about the game, either), and it's going to retell the story of the first game but all shiny and new.
This is a trend we've seen bursting on to the scene in recent years. For the first year-or-so of the lifespans of the Xbox One and the PS4 you couldn't really move for remasters. I'd list them all for you, but there's a lot and I don't really have the time to Google them all.
It's happening on the Switch too. Who can forget that hilarious video where James got all angry about the fact that Skyrim was going to be £60 on Nintendo's new is-it-a-handheld-is-it-a-console mash up? You don't remember it? Oh, well here it is then.
The question all of this raises is an interesting one – is this really something we want to see on the App Store? Not just NOVA, but the whole concept of older games getting new leases of life. And I guess there are two standpoints.
On the one hand the App Store is a flighty and changeable place. We've seen games disappear without trace, and thanks to Apple's constant upgrading of iOS, there's little chance that we're ever going to get to play those games again.
From that point of view, it's good to see developers going back to games and refreshing them for a new era. Especially the likes of NOVA, which in its time was a resource-heavy AAA production, but now looks a little bit on the wonky side.
But on the flip side of that, is this just another example of the creative malaise that's sweeping through gaming as a whole. It's not just another dude shooter, it's a dude shooter that we've all already shot a whole bunch of dudes in before.
And I know the arguments about mobile gaming being a multi-billion dollar industry, and that a company the size of Gameloft needs to trade on its brands as much as anyone else. But wouldn't you rather be playing a brand new NOVA game? Wouldn't that be preferable to retreading old ground that's been polished up a bit?
Of course the proof is in the pudding, but there's a very large part of me that thinks this is the tip of an iceberg we don't want to be crashing the mobile-gaming boat into. The App Store is already saturated with clones and iterations, and this smacks of a surreptitious way to do more of the same.
What do you think though? Looking forward to getting your hands on a new old NOVA, or would you rather that we weren't heading in this direction? Make your voice heard in the comments and we can have a right good chin-wag.
