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Games Entertainment

Bad Videogame Acting Chronicled 87

Posted by CowboyNeal from the less-than-stellar-scenes dept.
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.
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Bad Videogame Acting Chronicled More

Bad Videogame Acting Chronicled

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  • My favorite (Score:3, Funny)

    by BoomerSooner ( 308737 ) on Friday August 22, 2003 @09:11AM (#6764561) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • Thief 1 had some great voice acting.

      Thief 2 had some decent voice acting...with the noted exception of one of the voice actors for the guards, who was downright _terrible_. I mean, monotonous reading, stupid phrasing...everytime one of the guards with that voice would speak, I would cringe.
  • Let the obligitory "All your base" jokes begin.
    My favorite. From ninja gaiden II.
    Irene: What the?!
    Ryu: What the!?
    Robert TS: What the?!
    Did everyone in the game have to say it??

  • Wing Commander Series (Score:3, Funny)

    by EvilNutSack ( 700432 ) <{juhapearson} {at} {gmail.com}> on Friday August 22, 2003 @09:17AM (#6764623)
    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.
    • duh, you mean Mark Hamill. He's a famous film actor, as seen in Corvette Summer and the great sci-fi straight-to-video flick, Slipstream.

    • Oh man, I'd forgotten Mark Hamill. His "acting" in WC: Prophecy was pretty good proof of why his career crashed and burned like Farm Boy's snowspeeder on Hoth, especially when he was in the alien ship at the end. THAT was MST3K quality cheese.

      Heck, WC IV and Prophecy both were full of lousy acting. In IV, you had Malcolm McDowell chewing scenery like a madman (although it did have the redeeming feature of that cute dark-haired helmsperson, Sosa).

      Prophecy had even more cheese. You had:

      - the ice-queen
    • It's true sir, the Kilrathi have invisible fighters.

      Actually, the voice pack acting in WC2 was pretty darn good in my opinon. Maybe the downsampling to 11k or whatever helped it out.
    • Mark Hamill is a talented voice actor, however. He did the voices to a lot of early Lucas games, and you could NOT TELL it was him.

      For instance, in Full Throttle, he voiced several characters, including the main bad guy (rather sepulchral, like the classic undertaker's voice). You would never, in a million years, think it was Hamill. He also did a number of voices in Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and the only way to tell was by reading the credits.

      I figured I'd double-check on this, and

  • Great games, bad acting by the lead characters
    • Having just played GK1 recently, I'd say they aren't so bad. I know people complain about Tim Curry's part, but I didn't mind it. I thought Grace and Mosely were excellent. But, one memorable character is the Strong Man in Jackson Square. He only has one line which he says whenever you talk to him. To see how it could have been with him as the lead character, check this out. http://hosted.ray.easynet.co.uk/gk/fan22.html It's sad I even know that exists, but much sadder that someone took the time to w

  • Ginger Lynn in Wing Commander (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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.

  • Nothing will ever beat... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Milkhorse ( 700543 ) on Friday August 22, 2003 @09:31AM (#6764758)
    ...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++.
  • Although not acting in a computer game, some pretty atrocious advertising accompanied the launch of the Amiga CD32 games console in Europe.

    The official "Creation" commercial for the CD32 went something like this: A young man in a white coat was welcomed to a laboratory by a scientist in another white coat. Then there was a voice-over: "I never understood why he chose *me* to share his secret." (show a CD32), "this was twice as fast, twice as powerful" (pan over the "32Bit" text on the CD32) Then he continu

  • My Favorite: Star Ocean 2 (Playstation) (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ottergigas ( 620046 ) on Friday August 22, 2003 @09:52AM (#6764948)
    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...)
  • Red alert 2's acting was so bad, I almost stopped playing the game. Tanya was the most memorable character. There seemed to be an endless number of tanktops she would wear while leaning over a table. The camera knew where to point;) I thought it was pretty sad.
    • Mmmmm... Kari Wuhrer... Seriously though, I always thought that the acting in Red Alert was supposed to be bad. Campy mocking of the whole thing.

  • Resident Evil (Score:4, Funny)

    by cje ( 33931 ) on Friday August 22, 2003 @10:00AM (#6765022) Homepage
    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?
    • I think for what RE was, the acting was great. The cheesy B'ness of the acting was spot on. It just felt like a cheesy horror film, only scarier (those damn dogs scared the piss out of me...and that thing dropping down from above).
    • Don't forget Barry calling Jill "the master of unlocking" before he gives her a lockpick...
    • This is exactly the game and scene I thought of when I saw the headline of this story. Except it's the next line in that scene that has always stuck with me:

      "I hope this isn't...Chris's blood!"

      Can't you just hear the "dum dum DUM!" after it? :)

    • Those are the three best fucking lines in the whole game. I love that part. Seriously, like, for a year or so it became this huge inside joke between me and my friends. Every time somebody said "What is this?" or anything that sounded like it, one of us would be like "... BLOOD!!". :D

      Resident Evil is going to go down as a cult legend, i think, much in the way that the Evil Dead series has.

      And now, improv:

      Dying officer: "There was this... INCIDENT??? Involving these... zombie... LIKE... cre... eatures

    • Someone played a composition for me a couple of years back that was lines pulled from that game and put together in such a fashion that it sounded like a really cracked out porno. It was one of the funniest things i've ever heard.

  • Some other examples (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Metroid72 ( 654017 ) on Friday August 22, 2003 @10:10AM (#6765111)
    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 was going to mention Altered Beast, but you've spelt it wrong: I remember it being more like "Awise fwom your gwaaaave!"
    • The "cm'on lets fight" is actually from Ikari Warriors 2, but it's still an awesome sound clip.

      You're fighting some weird ugly alien beast boss and it decides to attempt to deride you in high-pitched barely understandable English. What a way to strike terror into the hearts of your opponents! And the next boss does it... and the next...
  • I always used Guy's lightning fast punches.

  • The Good Acting List Is Shorter (Score:3, Interesting)

    by robbway ( 200983 ) on Friday August 22, 2003 @10:17AM (#6765172) Journal
    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).

  • Deus Ex (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    JC 'Corn Fed' Denton had no range at all.

    Jock: OH MY GOD, JC, IT'S A BOMB!
    JC (loudly): A bomb.

    Words cannot express the hilarity.
  • Most of it was OK, but one of the women doing the maid voices was terrible. Also, Deus Ex. Especially the maid in the French hotel who said "I clean all of the rooms". It sounded like she had a mouth full of rocks.

  • From Duke Nukem 3D (Score:5, Funny)

    by trompete ( 651953 ) on Friday August 22, 2003 @10:25AM (#6765235) Homepage Journal
    "Shake it baby!"

    "You wanna dance?"

    Now THAT was acting. Am I the only person who hit spacebar for a half-hour?
    • No. You're definitely not the only one.

      And speaking of hitting the spacebar, there's nothing more hilarious to a 14 year old (how old I was when I was playing Duke3D) than pressing the spacebar to hear the toilet flush. That also added another half-hour of pressing the spacebar.

    • Re:From Duke Nukem 3D (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yes you were, you pathetic nerd.... ...

      NO YOU WEREN'T! *hysterical sobbing*
  • Revenant!
    Couple years old, it was sort of a dungeon hack -- Diablo style -- and the voiceovers for the main character (Locke) were simply ATROCIOUS. The game itself was sort of decent, but I actually gave up in disgust after a while. It was impossible to take the plot line seriously! I'm sure those of you who played the game agree. Anyway, I did a quick google for reviews, guessing I wasn't alone in thinking this, and sure enough:

    Understandably [madgamers.net] , Locke is angry and confused to suddenly find himself in a s
  • I don't even know what to say.

    It was bad enough that I couldn't even laugh. I just felt bad, like I felt bad for Jack Tripper when he scheduled a date with two girls on the same night. I felt bad for the actors, and for the people who wrote the scripts. It made me feel bad for everyone else who worked on this game (and did a good job).

    Best voice acting? Impossible Mission for the C64: "Another visitor. Stay awhile... STAAAY FOREVER!"
    • in HOTD2...when getting chased by a zombie a girl hollers out "Don't come. Don't come!"

    • In HOTD 2, you see agent G dying, giving you a piece of important info as he hunkers over. All you reply is a bouncy, "Thanks G!" Now if I was an antisocial teenager like the Best Buy kid who installed my car stereo, I might have thought this was a wild stab at sincerity, but instead I laughed like a hyena.
  • Tenchu had the best bad acting ever. I played the levels over and over again and didn't mind that I couldn't skip through the cut scenes because they were so entertaining.

    "He. He. He. What is THIS Bi-Zen-YA? There is more HERE than UUUSUUUUAL?"

    "We.. Could.. Not.. Do bus-i-ness without you"
  • 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.

    If I recall properly from my wasted youth, this was a special stage not a boss. The bosses you actually fought and didn't say too much afterward - this stage you just got to smash up the car with your trusty pipe/knee/elbow/etc.

    • Yep. It was a "bonus" stage I believe where you got a certain amount of time to destroy the car. Afterwards, there was a short sequence that used one of the standard bad guys who came from off-screen right, "dropped" to his knees and was theoretically saying "Oh my car". Oddly, I always thought he was saying "Oh my God". Goes to show how bad the sound quality was I guess.

  • Two games for good voice acting (Score:3, Informative)

    by edwdig ( 47888 ) on Friday August 22, 2003 @11:08AM (#6765793)
    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.
  • Not only did it feature Wayne from the Wonder Years, but it had the single most memorable (and poorly acted) line of the MPC Revolution:

    Want some rye? COURSE YA DO!
    • I dunno, I thought the incredibly over-hammed "Whatever you do, don't touch the green book!" from the brothers in Myst was worse.

      And the Scottish guy in RTZ was worse, too. "I've only got ONE MILK COW, and SHE only eats CARROTS! So just GO AWAY!"

      Overall, though, yeah, the quality of acting in RTZ was pretty dismal. But Rebecca Snoot was pretty.

  • Night Trap (Score:2, Interesting)

    by DJayC ( 595440 ) *
    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!

  • Bad and Best! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by AzraelKans ( 697974 )
    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 ac
    • Soul Reaver 1: The acting was good, but come on, the dialogue just got disgustingly fancy towards the end: "You are lost in a maze of moral relativism!" Um...yeah. That's engrossing. I never played Metal Gear Solid, but part 2 of MGS2 voiceover was a dungheap, perfectly complemented by the typical sappy worthless Japanese storyline. Silent Hill: Part 1. Are you kidding?
  • I always loved to play as Scorpion (I think he was the one that did it) and throw people. He says, in his worst WWF tone, "Oh! I'm gonna throw you over there!"
  • I suggest you grab a copy from mame.dk or for maybe just get the rom for the genesis version. The whole game is just one bad acting scene. My favorite has to be:
    Villin:"You can not escape"
    Hero:"You'll be the one whos escaping"
  • This game had some of the worst acting ever, in quasi-FMV no less. I'm having a little difficulty coming up with specific examples since it was so long ago, but I do remember that it was pretty bad. Somehow, the game itself still managed to be pretty good, though.

    "Shy Gypsy Slyly Spryly Tryst By My Crypt"
  • Deus Ex: the accents from the Hong Kong part of the game were hilariously horrible. Star Fox Adventures: yeah the game sucked but the king triceratops's voice was particularly bad

  • NOX (Score:1)

    by bitrott ( 232312 )
    A very entertaining and addicting game, almost totally ruined by the bad ren-faire acting. Even the script was decent... but the voices! *SHUDDER* I had to turn them off and go with the subtitles. old school, but I still played!

  • Sad (Score:2)

    by fm6 ( 162816 )
    I went out and bought Fox Hunt [gamespot.com] just because I saw it on a certain (extremely attractive) actress's resume. After dealing with software issues (who writes these brain-dead installers?), I went through about 5 minutes of crude game play, potty humor, and really really bad acting before I realized that I'd never be able to do the game long enough to see the object of my obsession. Being a stalker is all very well, but there are things you just can't do!
  • 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.

  • So bad they make fun of themselves! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Friday August 22, 2003 @02:45PM (#6768008) Homepage Journal
    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.
  • Robotic Alchemic Drive ("RAD")

    This is one of the best games ever made. I wish it had gotten more coverage. The voice acting is THE worst. Far, far worse than Resident Evil. Far worse than Star Ocean 2.
    The game has no hillariously terrible translation to save it (ala Zero Wing), it was just downright horrible. Particularly the blond German/Russian/Jewish/Chinese and sometimes Polish accented Scientist, and the male Heros ex-fiance Ellen.

    Seriously, go hunt this game down right now (~$20) for the entert
  • Not the expansion, but the actual game. The "voice" which instructs you on the initial training levels was just purely bad. I remember wondering if the whole game was going to suck so badly.

    Throw in some of the odd dialogue, particularly in the expansion (the whole Illadin evil-twin-brother love-triangle thing) sounded like a bad bad soap opera. I had to turn off the sound and just watch the subtitles, less I be embarred by anyone listening in.

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