Skinny Banter #1 Wrap-Up: Japan, Warcraft and Cyberpunk (2/4)

[Part two of our summary of Skinny Banter #1: Ultimate Game Mash-Up]

More Appealing than Raw Fish

Ashley Shankle indulges her love of Japanese RPG culture in ‘Give Me Romancing SaGa Minstrel Song with a Dash of Dark Cloud 2‘. Ashley tells us that “I don’t want a perfect game. I don’t like how sterilized the gaming environment is today. I want a game with heart” and this could be achieved by combining Minstrel Song‘s character customisation and party management with world development and crafting content from Dark Cloud 2. So convinced that this is the game mash-up combination of the gods, Ashley claims;

“So much ambition and making it a reality would just be the end-all be-all. That’s it. The end. Time to quit video games, because nothing could ever be better than that.”

The Ultimate Troll?

In ‘Ultimate Game Mashup – Let Me Bore You For a Moment‘, Rothalack claims that the ultimate game already exists and that there is no need for a fictitious mash-up to achieve gaming utopia. With no hint of irony, he states, “I can’t get over it, I love World of Warcraft… When I sit here thinking about other games that I liked as much as WoW… I can’t. Honestly I can’t even think of a game that compares.”

He may have a point, but holding up World of Warcraft‘s art style as second to none is… a controversial call. WoW may be a triumph of MMO evolution, but it wasn’t even graphically top of the pile when it was released nearly a decade ago. However, Rothalack does concede that there is room for improvement in other aspects of WoW, with more recent changes over-engineering gameplay.

“It needs to go back to its old ways where I felt like a harmless speck on the massive dangerous landscape.”

Cyberpunk Sagas

Ste Grainer summons his inner neuromancer to envisage ‘The Ultimate RPG: Zelda, FF6, ShadowRun, Myst, Valve and MUDs‘. His alluring cocktail of intellectual multiplayer cyberpunk has a central core based on a “great story: filled with mystery and emotion and generously sprinkled with humor. After that, the rest is icing.”

By bringing together the strongest elements of storyline-led experiences like Half-Life with puzzlers like The Room and a rich universe like ShadowRun, Ste teases us with a gaming experience described thus:

“One moment I may be jacking into a network to steal corporate data, the next in a wild gunfight full of flying bullets and fireballs. And just when I think that I’ve explored the game world, the vista opens up into the solar system or galaxy …”

Part Three: Spies, Trolls and Tools

Skinny Banter #1 Wrap-Up Index

1. Worlds, Wars and Ponies

2. Japan, Warcraft and Cyberpunk

3. Spies, Trolls and Tools

4. A Conclusive Mash-Up