I played Elite a lot on the Commodore 64 back in the day. Great game but at some point it was a little too directionless. If anyone in the modern gaming era ha

I played Elite a lot on the Commodore 64 back in the day. Great game but at some point it was a little too directionless. If anyone in the modern gaming era has captured that (semi-)open game play it's Rockstar with its Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series (and also Red Dead Redemption, which is just a mouthful). My particular favourite type of game is turn-based strategy. I spent hundreds of hours playing the original Civ (not so much 2 or 3 but an awful lot of 4 due to the Fall From Heaven 2 mod and almost none of 5). Heroes of Might and Magic was another big one. Frankly RTSs annoy me as they descend into "how fast you can click". I realize there's skill there but it's just not for me. Anyway, it's easy to lambaste the game industry with it's cookie-cutter FPSs/RTSs and the samey console titles (although I for one don't share the same nostalgia for old NES/arcade/Atari games that some fervent zealots do). But the fact is, it's never been more possible to write indie games than it is right now. Successes like Minecraft should tell you that you don't need a big studio $30 million budget for art. Nor do you need the latest, greatest 3D engine. Mobile gaming has a plethora of smaller developers. I, for one, would dearly love to see an Elite-style game but no one has made one (worth talking about), be it single-player or an MMO. Yes there's Eve Online but, for me at least, it falls short. It's aimed at the raiding crowd really. But think about it: how amazing could Elite be as a game you play on your iPad?