Slashdot Mirror
Bad Videogame Acting Chronicled
An anonymous reader writes "This site is documenting some great bad acting in video games. Sure, we all talk about what game had bad acting (Resident Evil comes up all the time), but this place has examples of why people call these games bad." This immediately brought to mind one of the bosses from the game Final Fight, when he says "Oh, my car" right after you've smashed his car, and he couldn't sound much more disinterested, nevermind that his ride was beaten in with a lead pipe.
Slightly off topic, but let's not forget Ginger Lynn in Wing Commander.
With an ex-porn star in a videogame, I was expecting the worst kind of acting in the movie clips when I got this game.... Surprisingly, though, she pulled off a decent job.
My favorite experience with voice samples still has to be the Playstation RPG Star Ocean 2... partially because the bad voice acting is something you *had* to experience in order to unlock the harder difficulty levels. You had to figure out ways to trigger the different voice samples during the fight sequences by having the characters fight in different combinations, try different attacks, etc. You also had the ability to play them from a big board of voice samples, which seemed to indicate that there were, oh, 1300 or so unique ones. Once you "unlocked" a certain number of them, you could play the game through again at the harder levels (and play any you'd encountered so far at will.) Some of the best included:
* "Craude has advanced forward!" (When the main character, named *cough cough* Claude) gained a level
* "I will turn you into a behot!" (One of the characters says this before a fight. We still don't know what it means.)
* "Secret medicine!" (actually the name of one character's attacks...)
* "Don't you think I'm very tough?" (one of the mini-bosses says something like this... very unconvincingly...)
I guess that in the 8bit/16bit era there were technical limitations, but what do you think about these ones:
"Comeoooonn.. let's fight" Ikari Warriors (NES): This one really makes you laugh when you listen to it.
"The last metroid is in captivity, the galaxy is at peace" Super Metroid (SNES): Did the guy had some helium before the voiceover?
"Aaahhh" Final Fight (SNES): Well.. it would have been better if the action was better coordinated with the speech
"Riise from your grave" Altered Beast (GEN): What the hell was that... a keyboard speaking?
"Tatsu-maki-senpu-kyaku!" SFII (SNES): OK. Guys/girls... is that what you hear? I hear "Tat-tet-tet-oruken"
"The adventures of Bayou Billy" (NES) : What? I guess Konami liked "speech" Better Examples: World Series Baseball (GEN): Very impressive at the time.
Rock n' Roll Racing: Decent, but very very redundant
I can't think of many video games that have good acting, or even good dialogue. Even though Metal Gear Solid has good voice acting, the plots and dialogue are so laughable at times, it destroys the acting. The website wouldn't suck up as much bandwidth if they listed the games with good acting.
Greetings! I am Twyla. (Hologram: Time Traveller by Sega).
Night Trap on the SegaCD had THE WORST acting EVER. As soon as I read the title of this article it instantly came to mind. I'm surprised it's not listed! The only great thing about that game was that, when I was ten years old, the girls running around in underwear was as good as porn!
Symphony of the night , best game in PSX, really bad acting as well, the text was fine for a game, but the pronunciation was laughable.
ie:
"I guess the same could be said about all religions".(Faggy sesame street villain voice.)
"What!?" (Completely over the top "David Hasselhof is my role model for voice acting" voice )
"But enough about that, have at you!" (less Faggy, saturday morning cartoon villain voice.)
Now these have the BEST voice acting:
Soulreaver: Ah!!! now thats what I call good voice acting! (with a slight shakespearian Tone as well mind you) first time I heard someone at a videogame without laughing. Part 2 was ok, but a bit over the top.
"Raziel you've been choosen."
Metal gear solid: snake, best game voice ever. Period.
Silent hill: part 1 was good, but part 2 is amazing, the voice acting in the end may just move you to tears, no kidding.
Go ahead MOD my day!
More opinions here
Anybody remember Off World Interceptor for the 3DO? I forget the purpose of the game, ya drive around on some planet and shoot stuff. It was made by Crystal Dynamics of Star Control 2 (port) fame.
They had cheesy FMV scenes that were acted and written almost as bad as any given episode of Babylon 5. But they had these two guys sitting in front of the screen a la MST3K riffing on them. Heh. That was funny!
I can't help but wonder, did they originally plan that, or did they realize the footage was so cheesy that they needed something to fix it? Either way, I enjoyed it. Too bad I had to play the game to get to those scenes.
"Derp de derp."