I'm moderately surprised you came back with a thought out response. As you'll surmise quite quickly, I still don't agree, but I appreciate the response and will take you off troll status.
You've got to be joking. It's already established that GameLoft clone popular franchises, and that N.O.V.A. and Gangstar are clones of H.A.L.O. and GTA respectively, down to the two most important ingredients in gaming: gameplay and art direction.
Execution is everything. The game play doesn't strike me as anything the same, and I'm saying this as an avid Halo player that was there for Halo 1. The Art direction is... Close, maybe, but I only see it in the lighting and use of glowing/shiny objects. However that was unique back in 2001, when we compared top tear FPS to games like Quake and Unreal. Today you get shiny bits
all over the place.
There are plenty of GTA games that aren't clones like Mafia, Saints Row and Sleeping Dogs.
I will grant you that the clonish nature of Mafia to GTA might be closer. I have not played either game. But as I said, GTA defines the genre. It would be easy to take any similarly styled game and call it a clone. But if you say the gameplay is exactly the same, and the art is the same, I'll take your word for it.
Have a read;
http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/r/iPhone/N.O.V.A./news.asp?c=17343, but of course if you're oblivious to all this you should probably refrain from calling people trolls who have done their research.
It was really hard to watch you put periods between the letters of Halo and capitalize it, and then tell me I don't do my research. Also, that article does little to convince me. He's pulling elements out of a franchise that spanned over 10 years and 6 games. N.O.V.A. has an ice scene? oooo. Must be a clone. And to say that just because a dude dressed in armor wearing a helmet and visor looks like Master Chief is also silly. As there have been 6 Halo games, there have also been
a few different version of Master chief as well. Now those, while positively different, are closer to being "clones". The image they show in that article is as close to
Metroid in design as it is to any iteration of MC.
Now all that is about art direction, which certainly is slightly easier to do comparisons on. As for gameplay, it's hard to say that similarities in crosshairs warrants an "omg it's a clone!". All I have to know is that I've played each and every Halo game, and each one felt like a halo game. I've played a few other FPS games in my time, and I like their "feel" for different reasons, sometimes even because they had a Halo gameplay style. I played N.O.V.A. long enough to know I didn't like the game play. It felt like no game I've ever liked, even though it was somewhat good to look at. It felt more like Quake to me, an FPS I didn't really care for in the ways of game play.
You could convince me that gameloft tried to make a clone of Halo, but the end result is that it's hard for me to distinguish any particular elements of it as being unique to Halo and not to other futuristic first person shooters.
