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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.
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
"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.