Last week we caught wind that Rovio was going to unveil a new game called Angry Birds Magic at WIMA this week. The kicker is that the new version of the game made use of NFC in some creative way. As it turns out, it’s not all that creative.

In a nutshell, it’s Angry Birds. Again. With the same birds being flung at the same pigs in exactly the same way. The difference is that Angry Birds Magic — which will come pre-installed on the Nokia C7 and should be made available for other Symbian phones — will only grant you access to the first five levels out of the box. To unlock the next set of five levels you have to find an NFC-equipped Nokia friend and tap phones. Upon doing so you get five more stages. Want to unlock the next five? You’ll need yet another NFC-touting friend. And so on and so forth. If you have no friends with NFC-equipped Nokias, apparently they’re going to toss around random NFC tags around town for you to find instead.

That’s pretty lame. As far as I can tell there are no multiplayer capabilities through the NFC, no exchange of high scores, or anything like that. That’s a shame. If this is the future of “social gaming,” I’m not sure I want any part of it.

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Weee. Oink, oink, oink. Few games in recent memory have captured the same kind of mass market hysteria as Angry Birds. It started on the iPhone, but the franchise quickly expanded to all kinds of other platforms. So, what’s next for Rovio? NFC, it seems.

All of the Angry Birds games thus far have been fundamentally the same: use a slingshot to hurl some birds toward increasingly complex structures. Well, there’s the WIMA conference in Monaco next week and it looks like Rovio Marketing Manager Matthew Wilson has a keynote called, “Introducing Angry Birds Magic with NFC.” That happens on April 20 at 2pm.

And that’s all they’re telling us. The assumption is that Angry Birds Magic is yet another iteration of the Angry Birds franchise, not unlike what we’ve already received with Angry Birds Seasons and Angry Birds Rio. The kicker, of course, is that “with NFC” that they tagged onto the end.

So, we’re left to speculate. How can NFC possibly integrate into a game like Angry Birds? Will we finally be seeing a multiplayer variant where you sling birds from one device to the other, battling it out to see who can destroy whose structure first? Is this how we bring a mechanic similar to Worms or even Battleship to the Angry Birds universe?

What do you think? What would Angry Birds with NFC look like?

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Photo: itsybitsyspidercrochet

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