Audio Atrocities

Hot off the presses, a website about terrible video games! Again! With dozens of those lying around, you need a hook to distinguish yourself from the crowd. How about a site dedicated entirely to terrible voice acting in video games? Jackpot.

Now, I'll be the first person to admit that perhaps my acting abilities are somewhat less than I profess them to be, as are my abilities to criticize actors. However, I can say without fear of overstepping myself that I, or indeed almost anyone, could do better jobs than these people.

As a public service, I'll scan the top five worst games and pick out the cream of the crap. In fifth place, we see the game Megaman 8 for the Playstation. Perhaps a good place to start would be this clip, where we can hear an actor stumble not once, but twice while reading his lines. A lesser producer would insist he do it again, but I suppose if you hire a voice actor that bad in the first place, you're not exactly going for the gold.

In fourth place, a crazy little game called Tenchu, also for the Playstation. One clip will not suffice in this case, so try on both of these for size. I suppose this is a step up from Megaman because it has both terrible acting and terrible writing.

In third, and proving that the Playstation was the hands-down champion of poorly thought out games, is Resident Evil. I know, it was a great game when you were ten, but listen to it now. While you can blame the first clip on poor acting, the second seems almost intentionally funny. It's not so much the "crow," it's the "or something."

At number two, Sega takes the torch from the Playstation to bring you Deep Fear. Quite frankly, I think that none of the lines were especially good. The only chuckle-worthy moments are the clips with DuBois, a (supposedly German) gay naval engineer. The obviously Australian (or New Zealish* or something) actor hams it up to the max, giving his character a high-pitched la-di-da voice that borders on offensive if it wasn't so damn funny.

And the coveted first place goes to Turbografx-CD's Last Alert. And it deserves it. I can't tell if the voice actor here is actually Japanese, or just a racist; I can't tell if this was supposed to be funny; I can't tell if they even bothered with a second take on this one; and I can't tell what the hell is going on here at all. "HEY GUY!" Oh yeah.

Oh, and I totally saw the new Indiana Jones flick. Movie-wise, it was all right. Indiana-wise, I think they would have been smarter to leave well enough alone.

*I looked this up. The adjective pertaining to a New Zealander is "New Zealand." That's right. If you're from New Zealand, you are New Zealand.