Western. Mechwarrior 2 was the first game I ever played, and the Timberwolf (in later installments bastardized as the 'madcat'. Inner Sphere have no idea how to properly name 'mechs) is forever glued in my mind as the example for what all battlemechs (which I think is a better term than 'western mecha') should be.
My whole family loved it. My mother was a professional pilot of a Marauder, my father preferred the Nova. Both were Kahn before I could read, and I was in the saddle as soon as I could reach the joystick. God, those were good days.
So keep your weirdo mecha with hands that punch and hold various over sized swords, keep your massive rifles, your heavily anthropomorphic "battlesuits". Even the Battlemechs that had hands (Atlas, among others) never carried melee weapons, or threw unrealistic metal punches. Once, we were Warriors. Mechwarriors. It felt so right.
I just hope this new installment they're working on doesn't get dumbed down for the console generation, the way Mech Assault was. That wasn't Mechwarrior, not in any way that I'm willing to recognize. I can only hope they take more elements from Mech2-4, those were (relatively) well done.
Eherm. went off on a tangent there. Western battlemechs are what got me into the sci-fi genre, an obsession that continues even today in the books I read, the movies I see, the way I think about and imagine the world, and not least, the games I play. So you can understand my bias towards it.
That's not to say that I see Mecha as universally bad, there was one show I saw a long time ago about a guy who was secretly the pilot of this massive crime-fighting combat-suit thing, charging around this big cityscape in a cold, metallic future. That was okay. but once you take something massive and metal, with legs and (presumably) all those gyroscopes and such that allow them to stand up, let alone shift weight around in the degree necessary for them to throw those punches/swing that massive sword, and make it fly around? Jump Jets are stretching it, but making them dash around the skies like sparrows just puts me off.
