Angry Gaming 11.05.07: Acting Out
Posted by Damian Sarcuni on 11.05.2007
If good voice acting isn’t all that good, how bad can bad voice acting get?
Welcome to Angry Gaming, the thirty foot tall mechanized robot that slays the gaming industry's armies and levels Tokyo for good measure. I am your hate master, Damian Sarcuni, and I am the binding force that holds clan 411's Halo clan together. War Chonan!
Acting Out
A few weeks ago we looked at some of the top voice actors in the business, and how they influenced some of the top selling games on a variety of platforms. We looked at the flaws in their speeches, the faults in their jobs, and critiqued their work in an unscrupulous attempt to determine what good voice acting is and what can be done to improve it.
The hate club chimed in the following week, expressing their opinions and knowledge on the topic as well. This surprised me quite a bit. For the longest time I've felt that my ears have failed I and that I didn't know good sound quality when I heard it. Yet it turns out that voice acting and sound quality were actually hotly contested topics. The whole thing seemed so interesting; I made a point to revisit the subject in the future and to look at the other end of voice acting…the dark, twisted, horrible end. The voice acting that gets special focus on shows like X Play and Cinematech, the stuff that you might find parodied in a Conan O'Brien sketch.
So let's try this one more time. I may not be able to pick out the best voice acting out there (I sure as hell can critique it down to nothing though…) but perhaps I can pick out horrible voice acting we can all agree sucks. Here are three of the worst voice acting jobs in games today, and theories as to how things got so bad.
Resident Evil – Jill Sandwich
I actually didn't want to include this one because the original Resident Evil is an older game and in future years there was a significant improvement in the voice acting quality (Leon's walkie talkie conversations in RE4 non-withstanding). However, the hate club has gone out of their way to inform me that not including the game would lead to a hefty amount of angst ridden emails aimed right at me, and I just can't have that this week. While the original Resident Evil drew in a new generation of gamers into the survival horror genre, the voice acting job on this game was absolutely awful. For starters, the sound quality was extremely poor, and it was possible to tell exactly when vocal clips for each character's speech began and ended. It's basically the same thing as it would be if you recorded a sentence on your windows sound recorder right this second, then played it back and listened to the ambience in the background your microphone picked up.
But Resident Evil is most renowned for the voice acting of specific characters. Most notably, the voice behind the Barry Burton character is the obvious target. Performed by Barry Gjerde, somewhat of a newcomer to the voice acting game at the Resident Evil was released, the character of Barry Burton handled the dramatic and drastic situations of the Umbrella mansion laboratory with all the grace and smoothness of wailing moose sliding down a muddy ravine. Primarily when interacting with the character of Jill Valentine, Barry is at his absolute worst, throwing in loud emboldened lines like "You were almost a JILL SANDWICH!" or "It might be best if you, THE MASTER OF UNLOCKING…" meant to emphasize and guide players through the game. Basically, Gjerde's voice was Capcom's best weapon with which to spoon feed gamers into solving upcoming puzzles, and this led to some comical moments no player would soon forget.
That's not to say that the rest of the team faired any better. Chris Redfield goes through the game sounding like a B movie G.I. Joe commando and Jill puts a nice high tension whine into all of her lines. The difference between these two and Barry, however, is that they didn't list their names in the game's credits. Chris is voiced by some mysterious man named "Charlie" and Jill's voice is only listed as coming from "Inezh". This leads to some interesting speculation as to why the voice acting was so bad in the first place. Did the actors know that it was so bad that they refused to attach their names with it? Did Capcom have a falling out with the actors and decide to stick their worst readings into the game out of spite? Or is this a sad attempt at English as a second language? Whatever the case may be, Resident Evil is famous as a game, a series, and one of the worst collection of vocals around.
House of The Dead – G's Bloodstains!
We could argue that all games involving zombies are almost required to have poor voice acting in the B movie tradition, but Dead Rising sort of breaks the pattern. The House of the Dead series has been going strong for quite a few years now and each progressive game has added different features from varying gun types to improved graphics and sound. But the voice acting quality has not changed at all, and each game is just littered with poorly spoken dramatic readings emphasizing all the wrong words.
"Help ME! Help ME!" citizens in peril scream as you run through the streets taking aim at their zombie assailants in House of the Dead 2. In the same game, two agents chance upon their fallen comrade, G, who is injured and bleeding. After fragging several more enemies and passing by more gore in the streets, they chance upon a puddle of blood. "G's bloodstains!" they exclaim in shock, just before being attacked by evil Giger-like worm creatures. How these men were able to differentiate their colleague's blood from all the surrounding blood is anyone's guess, but they seem damn sure of where it came from. Perhaps genetic testing is overrated? God forbid some girl tells one of these agents she's pregnant. You won't need Jerry Springer to reveal who the father is with gullible cops like these around.
House of the Dead 3 brought more of the same schlock amusement, such as Daniel Curien's emotionless oath to return to the core of the zombie infection should the world ever "get out of hand". In House of the Dead 4, we were treated to such hilarious lines as the mystery man's curse on humans: "Wretched humans have no need of hope" or G's temporal paradox to comfort his fellow agent: "It's now time for you to rest now, James." Most of the voices in House of the Dead go unaccredited, and it's just as well since the series tends to fall into the "so bad its good" category in several areas. Interesting addendum: Zombie Revenge which also took place in the House universe, is equally as cheesy, adding in a narrator who threw in comments to enhance the action such as "Bullets!" and "There's no time!"
Crackdown – Peacekeepers Need Your Help
It's rare these days that the entire voice acting script of a single game tends to rest on one man or woman, but that's more or less the case in Crackdown. Apart from enemies and pedestrians, whose voices are usually too low to understand coherently, the only voice in the game comes from the agency direct/narrator voiced by Michael McConnohie. Throughout all of Crackdown Michael is constantly in your ear, advising you on various situations and occasionally poking fun at your shortcomings. Since Michael's voice is so bold and authoritive in this game, and since he speaks nearly every 25 seconds, he quickly becomes the most annoying aspect of the whole experience.
"Agent! Those peacekeepers need your help!" Keep in mind that helping peacekeepers does absolutely nothing to improve your gameplay experience and in fact only serves to deter you from the main objective of the game. The agency director Michael plays is clearly designed to be an asshole and this is only more proven by the game's unsubtle twist ending. I don't think there is anyone who played through Crackdown without once checking the options menu to see if there was a way to turn off the narration voices. Alas, there isn't, and what little fun experience was put into Crackdown is often ruined by the constant interruption of Michael's voice.
It doesn't help that the game's designers timed it so that Michael is constantly talking, or that he often talks about situations five minutes after they have happened, but Michael also over does his role, speaking deeply and in a snide tone for nearly every delivered line. This is just voice acting at its worst, and it's sad that nearly all of Crackdown had to hinge on one man's job, veteran of the voice acting world (which he sort of is) or not.
The Anger
Here I sit, same as ever, wondering just what is wrong with the video game industry in terms of listening ability. While several of these games are indeed imports and do have that excuse for poor voice acting, so much of this stuff is recorded overseas by voice actors with a clear understanding of the English language. Do their directors not understand it? It's a minor mystery, and one that we probably shouldn't dwell on. This is one of those rare cases where it's just better to tell game makers "Hey, this voice acting sucks, don't do it this way anymore" and move on hoping for a better attempt next time. Until that happens, embrace the hatred.
