Comments on: I like girls. But now, it's about justice.

I like girls. But now, it's about justice.

East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 — Fri, 13 May 2011 14:47:02 -0800

Top 50 Worst Video Game Voices brought to life by some guy's face. Collected by Audio Atrocities. Previously 1 2.

By: Astro Zombie

Astro Zombie — Fri, 13 May 2011 14:56:16 -0800

You know, this guy is an awesome interpreter of this dialogue. He's really bringing out unexpected nuances.

By: Foci for Analysis

Foci for Analysis — Fri, 13 May 2011 14:57:58 -0800

#3 is awesome :)

By: absalom

absalom — Fri, 13 May 2011 14:58:17 -0800

Aw, man! Why didn't I think to post this when I saw it the other day? I agree, this guy is aces with the faces. I actually sat through the entire thing, which I almost never do.

By: RogerB

RogerB — Fri, 13 May 2011 15:00:12 -0800

This is surprisingly fantastic — somehow all the face-making adds so much extra ham that it makes the original ham much more palatable.

By: Artw

Artw — Fri, 13 May 2011 15:00:34 -0800

Heh, no Deus Ex?

By: "Elbows" O'Donoghue

"Elbows" O'Donoghue — Fri, 13 May 2011 15:01:58 -0800

Die, monster! You don't belong in this world!

By: brundlefly

brundlefly — Fri, 13 May 2011 15:04:34 -0800

This is great. I particularly liked the one for "The Space Adventure".

By: Errant

Errant — Fri, 13 May 2011 15:05:08 -0800

Awesome. "He wrote it in his own blood? WAY TO GO, KID!"

By: Astro Zombie

Astro Zombie — Fri, 13 May 2011 15:05:54 -0800

DENNIS!

By: absalom

absalom — Fri, 13 May 2011 15:09:28 -0800

I mean, the part where he does that whole little quick back and forth conversation about Chopin? That's just flat impressive by any standard.

By: lord_wolf

lord_wolf — Fri, 13 May 2011 15:12:01 -0800

That was unexpectedly great. I was expecting to hear, "What strength! But don't forget there are many guys like you all over the world!"

By: Sys Rq

Sys Rq — Fri, 13 May 2011 15:16:21 -0800

When will game designers realize voice acting can only ever make a game worse?

By: Navelgazer

Navelgazer — Fri, 13 May 2011 15:17:11 -0800

This just reminds me of a random stock passerby in GTA:3, who was hefty and dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and clearly meant to be a gay stereotype, and as far as I could discern only ever said one of three things when you walked past him: 1.) "In the Navy..." 2.) "There's no need to feel down!" 3.) "There's a place you can go." It should probably have been offensive, but the voice actor totally sold it. And every time I walked past the stock character without noticing him at first my eyes would brighten a bit as I heard his voice. Like, "oh, there's my old friend." I don;t know if Rockstar North is actually homophobic or if they were just making the stock "gay" character is satirically broad as everybody else in the voice cast, but somehow it crossed the line from offensive to endearing, for me.

By: kmz

kmz — Fri, 13 May 2011 15:29:37 -0800

When will game designers realize voice acting can only ever make a game worse? Mass Effect 1 and 2 would be a hundred times worse without Jennifer Hale.

By: brundlefly

brundlefly — Fri, 13 May 2011 15:38:44 -0800

Sys Rq: "When will game designers realize voice acting can only ever make a game worse?" *cough*

By: chimaera

chimaera — Fri, 13 May 2011 15:40:08 -0800

When will game designers realize voice acting can only ever make a game worse? I refute it thus! Portal.

By: chimaera

chimaera — Fri, 13 May 2011 15:40:30 -0800

brundlefly beat me to it.

By: starman

starman — Fri, 13 May 2011 15:50:05 -0800

I love the The Mega Man 8 line.. one take is all you get, I guess!

By: Sys Rq

Sys Rq — Fri, 13 May 2011 15:59:29 -0800

Does Portal really count, though? I thought it was all synthesized speech, or at least effected such that the awfulness of the acting seems intentional.

By: We had a deal, Kyle

We had a deal, Kyle — Fri, 13 May 2011 16:02:59 -0800

Portal is real speech post-processed to sound synthesized. (And is beautifully acted, IMHO.)

By: The Whelk

The Whelk — Fri, 13 May 2011 16:03:12 -0800

Nope, three actors. Portal 2 has even less if the computer sound.

By: meese

meese — Fri, 13 May 2011 16:03:48 -0800

I'm surprised you'd think the acting in Portal was so awful, you'd suspect it was intentional. It was so perfect with the dry irony and hostility. And I've only played a few minutes of Portal 2... But the voice acting in those few minutes was the best part of the game.

By: Sys Rq

Sys Rq — Fri, 13 May 2011 16:08:11 -0800

(And is beautifully acted, IMHO.) And the Oscar goes to...

By: jake

jake — Fri, 13 May 2011 16:08:15 -0800

WE MUST WECOVAH ALL DA ENNAGY IMMEDALY, WUH-MEGAMAN. The crazy part is that Japanese companies STILL haven't gotten their heads around English voice acting. FF13 was just unbelievably bad, and it had about a 30 godzillion dollar budget. I think it goes deeper than just a basic language barrier: Entire manners of speaking that sound perfectly natural in a Japanese game (or anime) will sound stilted or awkward in English no matter how loosely they're translated, just because of fundamental differences in the way people express thoughts, and the way characters are developed. Even with universally approachable stories and big-name actors, it's always going to be a bit strange. It can either be charming and endearing (Miyazaki), or hilariously awful (these clips).

By: East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94

East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 — Fri, 13 May 2011 16:09:41 -0800

Suffer, like G did! Suffer, like G did?

By: jake

jake — Fri, 13 May 2011 16:16:26 -0800

And yeah, Deus Ex is a rare case. How in the world is that game so amazingly good, in spite of "PAHAPS A PRESEN FOH YO GUHFRIEND?" ?!!? Any Deus Ex fan who hasn't played the Malkavian Mod needs to stop what they're doing and play it now.

By: The Winsome Parker Lewis

The Winsome Parker Lewis — Fri, 13 May 2011 16:31:31 -0800

Same thing with the Shenmue games, jake. Terrible, horrible voice acting but they're still beyond amazing.

By: Hoopo

Hoopo — Fri, 13 May 2011 16:35:25 -0800

Speaking of voice acting, everytime I put Resident Evil 4 in the Wii my wife shouts from the next room "WHADDAYA BUYIN?"

By: East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94

East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 — Fri, 13 May 2011 16:40:10 -0800

WHADDAYA SELLIN?

By: Errant

Errant — Fri, 13 May 2011 16:41:09 -0800

This dude really reminds me of Wil Wheaton.

By: meese

meese — Fri, 13 May 2011 16:46:27 -0800

WHADDAYA SELLIN guy is totally who I thought of immediately, seeing this, too!

By: longdaysjourney

longdaysjourney — Fri, 13 May 2011 16:49:12 -0800

How did Yakuza 1 not make this list? Such gloriously bad voice acting.

By: East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94

East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 — Fri, 13 May 2011 16:49:25 -0800

The worst thing is when a piece of dialogue is repeated. This code should be in every game:

play(dialog) {
if (dialog.lastPlayed is null OR dialog.isCriticalToTheGameplayOrPlot OR dialog.lastPlayed < 2MinutesAgo) {
// ok, play the dialog
} else {
// do something less infuriating
} 
}

By: Sibrax

Sibrax — Fri, 13 May 2011 17:06:15 -0800

Somewhat related: Stephen Merchant talking about working on Portal 2. Naughty Dog gave a talk at GDC a few years ago about how they got such quality dialogue into Uncharted, and the reaction of most of the audience was, "You want us to do what? Do you have any idea what that would cost?!" IIRC, voice actors are paid by the hour, and there's a daily minimum, so calling them back to fix things after you actually try it in the game is prohibitively expensive. And, of course, the good ones are expensive to begin with. Even just doing a few retakes can cost a serious amount of money - and good luck trying to justify that cost with your publisher.

By: The Whelk

The Whelk — Fri, 13 May 2011 17:18:25 -0800

Yeah good voice actors are expensive and games tend to have razor thin budgets to begin with. That being said Portal 2 gets my bid for Best Performance by a Personality Sphere or Rouge AI in a Fictional Construct.

By: cortex

cortex — Fri, 13 May 2011 17:18:37 -0800

Ha. This was surprisingly charming. And yeah, Deus Ex is a rare case. "Thanks fa geddin me in!" "I SPEEL my DRINK!"

By: Cool Papa Bell

Cool Papa Bell — Fri, 13 May 2011 17:19:45 -0800

Mass Effect 1 and 2 would be a hundred times worse without Jennifer Hale. I had the pleasure of directing Jennifer on a past game. Total pro. I remember seeing her walk in and immediately start removing jewelry -- earrings, necklace, etc. -- so they wouldn't make a sound. We were asking her to do a sound-alike to another actress, and out of a dozen actors doing the same thing, she was the only one that had bothered to gather her own clips of the actress and put them on an iPod and, you know, actually practice and rehearse before the session.

By: The Whelk

The Whelk — Fri, 13 May 2011 17:36:18 -0800

Question: Is there a separate guild for voice actors that sets minimum rates and the like and game companies tend to use non-union labor to save money or something? So many games sound like "My cousin at theater camp" . That being said, aside from Portal? What would Baldur's gate be without Minsc's screaming or Planescape without Mort's unction?

By: Artw

Artw — Fri, 13 May 2011 17:41:15 -0800

The otherwise unremarkable WH40k game Fire Warrior gets my vote of awesome for having both Tom Baker AND Brian Blessed. Shouting!

By: Cool Papa Bell

Cool Papa Bell — Fri, 13 May 2011 17:42:31 -0800

Is there a separate guild for voice actors that sets minimum rates and the like and game companies tend to use non-union labor to save money or something? They're covered by SAG. So many games sound like "My cousin at theater camp." My opinion: * Many games don't even bother with SAG actors. It may very well be someone's cousin at theater camp. * Most of the games in this video are actually Japanese games, so the English lines are written and performed to match the story and the animation. The story is weird because ... come on, it's Japan. But they're also covering for additional animation by adding words and sound effects and creating stilted dialogue to match the mouth movement. * There are some really shitty writers out there. * Some games don't even bother to pay for shitty writers, so the dialogue is written by the designer that is most capable of stringing sentences together. * Designers are not generally skilled as directors. You can take perfectly good dialogue and a perfectly good actor and fuck it all up by asking the actor to do is faster, slower, harder, more energy, less energy, more emotion, less emotion oh jesus get me the fuck out of this studio I have other shit to do no one's going to play this stupid fucking game anyway Die, monster! You don't belong in this world! can I please have my check now?

By: Artw

Artw — Fri, 13 May 2011 17:46:52 -0800

Yeah, a lot of these could be crappy anime dubs and I wouldn't know the difference.

By: Artw

Artw — Fri, 13 May 2011 17:48:48 -0800

Oh! You know who else goes all out? Jim Ward as the AI on Defence Grid. Plus as part of the Portal ARG they did a level that's both him AND GLADoS, which was super fun.

By: Artw

Artw — Fri, 13 May 2011 17:56:24 -0800

(Defence Grid is great, BTW, and available for next to nothing pretty much any time Steam has a sale. Thorougly recommended. )

By: The Whelk

The Whelk — Fri, 13 May 2011 17:57:20 -0800

Stephen Fry as the announcer of Little Big Planet is also good

By: The Whelk

The Whelk — Fri, 13 May 2011 18:01:24 -0800

Merchant on recording Portal 2 "I have to say, I found the entire thing really exhausting. More than anything I've ever done before because I'm in this little recording booth, shouting down these imaginary corridors, imaginary gantries, pretending to fall off things and really trying to move around and live it as best I could. I know it sounds really pretentious, but really try to move around like this robot so my voice would feel like it was animated. I was really working hard to try and put myself in that environment, I guess, which is not something I normally do as a performer. Normally I just rock up and I do the lines and I go away again. I'm not an accomplished actor. But for some reason I was really working hard. I guess because I wasn't really in a set, I wasn't in a costume, so I was using my imagination as best I could to try to imagine this would. And again, the guys at Valve were very good at painting a portrait of what the world would look like before it was designed."

By: Navelgazer

Navelgazer — Fri, 13 May 2011 18:02:45 -0800

I'll add in a little bit of informed opinion: I got a job at a small (one might say "boutique") recording studio in New York due to some work I did for hire on a video game voice-acting session. (That job also led me to Metafilter, so thank you again, dubold.) They hire the same voice actors that you get in American cartoons. The difference, I feel, is that the amount of dialog requires fewer takes in order to keep to any budget at all, but more that the actors are working with less context. They are just as talented as they would be recording for a cartoon, but they have nothing to play off of. Just my opinion.

By: Lovecraft In Brooklyn

Lovecraft In Brooklyn — Fri, 13 May 2011 18:05:23 -0800

Played Arkham Asylum last night and realized again how perfect Mark Hamill's Joker is. Not sure if that counts though. The bosses in Bayonetta are creepy. Red Dead Redemption has good voices. I think this mostly shows up how WEIRD most game writing is.

By: Lovecraft In Brooklyn

Lovecraft In Brooklyn — Fri, 13 May 2011 18:06:48 -0800

Also, Mike Patton in The Darkness. Actually, I liked all the voices in that game.

By: The Whelk

The Whelk — Fri, 13 May 2011 18:07:08 -0800

Well I now a lot of US TV animation actually has the entire cast in the room recording the lines together, so you can get a more natural sound and I imagine it's easier to get into the scene. Movie animation records all the line separately, usually, and that sounds like the hardest thing ever, you have to get into a groove completely by yourself.

By: Artw

Artw — Fri, 13 May 2011 18:13:26 -0800

I have no idea if this is still the case but it used to be that the preferred format for writers to deliver game dialogue in was an excel spreadsheet - all these little snippets of dialogue, one to a cell.

By: Songdog

Songdog — Fri, 13 May 2011 18:23:14 -0800

This is so well done.

By: chococat

chococat — Fri, 13 May 2011 18:24:29 -0800

Wow this guy is awesome.

By: East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94

East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 — Fri, 13 May 2011 18:26:23 -0800

Did someone say bad anime? NSFW ?

By: DU

DU — Fri, 13 May 2011 18:45:02 -0800

Um....the voice acting in Portal is not synthesized although it is processed. And the acting is not terrible. That's exactly how a computer would act.

By: BiggerJ

BiggerJ — Fri, 13 May 2011 20:19:21 -0800

I decided to look up one of these voice actors on a whim... guess who's coming back next year?

By: chococat

chococat — Fri, 13 May 2011 20:51:18 -0800

Yes, the voice acting in Portal and Portal 2 is fantastic, totally sells the game. Sarcastic and dry and perfect. We just started Portal 2, my son was watching me play (I'm only up to Chapter 2 so far, going slow...savouring it.) Anyhow, we got to the part where...something happens to the Stephen Merchant character...and my son yelled, "No!" Total testament to selling a character, by voice, that has no human characteristics (or no characteristics at all) to relate to.

By: Mister Moofoo

Mister Moofoo — Fri, 13 May 2011 21:07:57 -0800

I was so expecting David Boreanaz as Leon from Kingdom Hearts to show up in this. Because he sounded like he was asleep.

By: Astro Zombie

Astro Zombie — Fri, 13 May 2011 21:20:43 -0800

I can't stop watching this video.

By: The Whelk

The Whelk — Fri, 13 May 2011 21:43:44 -0800

It creates a very strange feeling AZ, it's so hammy and intimate and specific. I feel like I shot got eight months of dating at once.

By: East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94

East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 — Fri, 13 May 2011 22:51:17 -0800

My favorite is #36. The tilt, headshaking and the eyebrow express that even the game character is skeptical of the forgotten gods of ancient times.

By: bjrn

bjrn — Sat, 14 May 2011 00:26:03 -0800

No mentions of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion yet? They had these people in the streets who would say a few lines, but the lines were recorded separately and seemingly recorded by different people and/or intended for different characters. For instance this man or this woman.

By: sinnesloeschen

sinnesloeschen — Sat, 14 May 2011 09:25:41 -0800

All that and nothing from Metal Gear Solid 2?

By: danb

danb — Sat, 14 May 2011 09:37:22 -0800

This guy rules. I appreciate that the list he used mixes together horrible writing and horrible voice acting.

By: East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94

East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 — Sat, 14 May 2011 10:27:26 -0800

More from that Arctic Blast guy in Chaos Wars

By: Pronoiac

Pronoiac — Sat, 14 May 2011 10:34:32 -0800

Oh, look, a Zardoz reference in #8.

By: East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94

East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 — Sat, 14 May 2011 10:40:30 -0800

I can't believe Chaos Wars is from 2008. Shortly after release, a number of websites parsed the Chaos Wars credits to show that a fair number of the "actors" in the game were just friends and family of the CEO.

By: DaDaDaDave

DaDaDaDave — Sat, 14 May 2011 11:07:28 -0800

I can't believe Chaos Wars is from 2008. Keee. Keee. Keee. Keee.

By: Harry

Harry — Sat, 14 May 2011 14:31:37 -0800

YOU FACE JARAXXUS

By: Ian A.T.

Ian A.T. — Sat, 14 May 2011 17:04:32 -0800

I think his performances are so good that it actually defuses the purpose of the list...it's like his miming finds a way to retroactively justify the weird line readings that many of these have. And if we're talking favorites, mine are: 1. The slight sidewards glance he gives on the line "my wife, my...daughter," as though he can't quite remember, and 2. the BJ Hunnicutt-esque "Okay" in #11.

By: The Whelk

The Whelk — Sat, 14 May 2011 17:43:28 -0800

Well he kind of turns kitsch, horrible stuff we laugh at cause it's horrible, into camp, a stylized extreme version of something we like.

By: legion

legion — Sat, 14 May 2011 22:15:14 -0800

After the first one - Resident Evil - I waited and waited for another game I had played. But it never came. Clearly, I have played far too few awful melodramatic Japanese games.

By: winna

winna — Sun, 15 May 2011 12:35:41 -0800

This is amazing! I think his eyebrows sell a lot of these.

By: Sutekh

Sutekh — Tue, 17 May 2011 06:55:43 -0800

[STALKER SPOILER] The Wish Granter in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is still creepy, even in Russian.

By: The Great Big Mulp

The Great Big Mulp — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 08:52:16 -0800

Star Ocean: The Last Hope's Lymle makes the game nearly unplayable, for me.

By: Glinn

Glinn — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 16:56:37 -0800

The original Kerrigan from Starcraft was pretty great. I guess they replaced her and Raynor, though.