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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.
Is in the first Thief game on the first level. If you knock out the first citizen you encounter with the blackjack. He makes this effeminate groan "Ooooooooooo". I play that level for a laugh now and then.
In which a leary Mark Hamilton barely fitting in a blue jumpsuit tries to pull every chick in the game remains one of the most memorable acting moments in PC gaming.
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...the FFX "laugh" scene. You know the one I mean. Why did my mom have to walk in on me THEN of all times. Gar... Embarrasment++.
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...)
Resident Evil is a great game, but the acting truly deserves the label that it gets. I think the worst example is right out of the chute, where Chris Redfield is missing and Barry and Jill find some blood on the floor of the mansion, and Barry asks "Is this .. Chris' blood?" in the same tone of voice that you might ask "Are you going to eat that sandwich?"
Of course, I think right before that, there's an exchange like this:
BARRY: What? What is this?
JILL: What is it?
BARRY: Blood!
Apparently, Jill and Barry have never seen blood before?
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
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).
"Shake it baby!"
"You wanna dance?"
Now THAT was acting. Am I the only person who hit spacebar for a half-hour?
More than enough BS
see, but with Deus Ex I always figured that was supposed to be on purpose, sorta showing his ability to remain calm based on his inhuman parts, etc etc. plus, if you deliver your lines sorta average, they come across ok if you're playing as 'good guy' or 'bad guy' without having to record a second line for every situation.
Sierra's Quest For Glory 4: Shadows of Darkness had great voice acting. I don't know if it's true, but they claimed it was the first PC game to have voice acting. The acting was all very good. They had John Rhys-Davies (Gimli in the LOTR movies) do the narration. Unfortunately, the game suffers from CPU speed bugs. Certain parts were a little hard on my Pentium 75. They're impossible on my P3-850. The game is definately worth playing though if you can. It has a lot of replay value, as you can play as either a Fighter, Magic User, Theif, or Paladin. The subplots are different with the different character types, and the puzzles that are shared between types usually have different solutions for different characters.
Another good one is Eternal Darkness on the GameCube. Some of the acting at the very end of the game is a little painful, but I think that's more because of the really cheesy writing than anything else.
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
Best voice acting in a videogame EVER: Sinistar. That used to freak my **** out.
Creepiest: "Beware. I Live." (when he's fully assembled somewhere on the map)
Second-creepiest: "I Hunger." (when he's looking around for you)
Most Adrenaline-Pumping: "AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRARARAGHHHHHHHGGAGRGARAR!" (when he finds you, approximately one and a half seconds before you die.)
I had the distinct misfortune of seeing "Super Mario Bros." on cable the other day, for lack of any other good thing on, and that got me thinking. Sure, the acting in many games today is bad... but at least it was never that bad.
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
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."