In the comments of my last post, my esteemed Thumbs colleague Duncan pointed out another terrible property of most video game voice recording, one on which I have often commented elsewhere.  It is the tendency of voice actors, under poor direction or using poor scripts, to perform an interrupted statement by actually stopping where the ellipses or dash occurs in the script, rather than actually being interrupted.

Now, in this case, it’s slightly more understandable.  I realize that most games aren’t budgeted to actually have actors in the same room during the same session, able to play off one another and cut each other off if the script calls for it.  But, in the end, there’s really no reason the actor can’t simply record a longer version of the line, and have a sound designer or editor cut it off convincingly.

There’s also no excuse for that unintentional pregnant pause that inevitably occurs between the end of the interrupted actor’s painfully weak trail off into ellipses, and the so-called interruption.  With the amazing dynamic sound blending and manipulation that goes on across five channels in so many of today’s games, it should not be too much to expect a sound engine that can, in a completely pre-scripted sequence, position two recordings close enough to one another to produce a vaguely realistically abrupt interruption during a–

Sound designer: Can’t be done, you see, because–

Snake: METAL GEAR?!

Last night, I dreamt that the major executives of Funcom were attempting to dominate the world with some kind of enormous Metal Gear-like weapon.

I was witnessing this on a highway in my car, greatly distressed, so I emailed Ragnar Tornquist, Funcom employee and designer of The Longest Journey, with a brief but impassioned plea for salvation.  The email read something like this:

“Ragnar,

I hope this message will do some good.  I don’t know if you know what’s going on, and you might even be involved since your company is behind it, but for the good of the world you need to help.”

Mr. Tornquist then flew overhead and, using a strategy similar to that of Fox’s final smash in Super Smash Bros. Brawl,  dropped an enormous tank onto his coworkers’ Metal Gear, and that is how the designer of The Longest Journey saved the world in my idiotic, inexplicable dreams.