Posts with tag mashups

At first, I wasn't entirely positive how I felt about Warcraft Meets Star Trek. The author, who goes by muffstermunch, doesn't have a lot of credits to his name yet, and does say this is his first full-length music video. So, while I was definitely interested in the idea, I wasn't sure what to think.

As I fired up the YouTube stream, though, my beloved Draenei fiancee saw it over my shoulder. Recognizing the song from old Dr. Demento shows, she started laughing at the dancing gnomes and immediately yelled, "Oh my god, that's awesome!" So, if nothing else, that experience instantly won me over.

Warcraft Meets Star Trek is one of those machinima pieces that is just plain fun. The sheer ridiculousness of the WoW models chosen to represent the original cast is brilliant. The idea to use of a brooding Night Elf as Spock was particularly inspired, in my opinion. While the ending credits could probably be shorter for most people's tastes, I think the author has created an overall laugh-worthy, fun music video.

The author definitely won me over with his freshman effort, and I truly hope to see more comedic bits from him.

---

The New York Times has an article up about Microsoft's latest attempt at figuring out mashups-- squeezing the data from one piece of software into another, and World of Warcraft gets an interesting mention. Apparently students at Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts are working on how to put WoW player data into Facebook accounts.

We've covered this type of thing before, but Blizzard has a long way to go in making their data open to any players who want to use it. Just recently another MMO named Dungeon Runners decided to break open their player data, into a form that almost anyone could use, and we know that Blizzard has the ability to share lots of data online, but they still haven't opened it up yet. 2.4 is giving us a lot of different ways to view our combat data, and almost every day the Armory adds new features, but none of them have yet been aimed at getting the data out of there and doing cool stuff with it elsewhere.

Maybe the reason for this is that they're planning to do it themselves. At any rate, there is a ton of information on Blizzard's servers that players would love get their hands on, and there are plenty of things on the other end to do with it. All that's required is for Blizzard to give us some hooks in, and then real WoW mashups can begin.