Attention all video game writers voice acting directors:

When you have a voice line that is intended to sound like a corrupted, spotty voice transmission, from which words are missing in order to convey a sense of urgent desperation and loss of control, please record the actor reading a version from which the words are not missing, and then have your sound team edit it to actually sound corrupted and garbled.

On top of that, how preposterous must it feel as a voice actor to actually perform something like that? I realize that video games aren’t necessarily the cream of the prose crop to begin with, but this is more of a technical issue than a creative one.

Come on, now. This isn’t hard. Why do, time and time again, video games feature actors actually reading the lines with the words omitted? It is painful to my ears to hear a person reading something like, “Can’t being overrun oh God we’re Johnson is please help they’re here and.” Except there are pauses in between every other word which my brain, after a lifetime of interacting with humans and being able to discern what an artificial pause sounds like, is supposed to interpret as signal loss.

That is awful. Really, guys. If you’re spending tens of millions of dollars on a game, especially a dialogue-centric game, you can afford to write a few extra words for the two instances of this scenario in your massive script of hundreds of pages, and yet I hear this cringe-inducing faked transmission crap all the time. BioWare, pay attention.

It isn’t that hard! It won’t even increase your budget! I promise!

I think I’ve had my monthly fill of cutscenes.  In the last six hours or so, I completed both Metal Gear Solid 4 and Mass Effect.

And then I won three rounds of Catan.

When Mass Effect was released, I noted that I would love to see a game like this (or, really, this very game) with much of the combat stripped away, putting the gameplay emphasis on the already-excellent dialogue system that provides a framework for hugely enjoyable social interactions. You can help characters, confound them, double-cross them–it was, and it remains, the best part of the game for me.

But I will say this: while I would still be enormously interested in a game–many games!–such as the one I describe, I picked up Demiurge Studios’ PC version of Mass Effect this week and it almost feels like a whole new game. (more…)