Interesting little article on Slate

[secretvampire]

http://slate.msn.com/id/2097296/

[adamsappel]

Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu, and Cameron Diaz starred in a Charlie's Angels game, but I've heard better emotive range come out of Stephen Hawking's voice box.

:lmfao:

[Calvin]

That was funny!

 

Even Ed Asner decided to play a Jedi in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

 

That i didn't know...

[blackcalx]

That reminds me of something. I never checked it out to see if it really was, but I swear that the stately, old veteran prize fighter on Taris sounded just like Morgan Freeman.

 

For years I have wanted to get into voice acting, and I consider it to be one of my dreams to some day voice a game character.

[Jeff W]

Originally posted by blackcalx@Mar 17 2004, 07:13 PM

 

For years I have wanted to get into voice acting, and I consider it to be one of my dreams to some day voice a game character.

I've played Live with you, keep dreaming. :green:

[Mark E]

For years I have wanted to get into voice acting,

 

Ha, you and me both.

 

I could have done so during the formative years of CD-ROM gaming and nobody would have known the difference with the wooden line acting going on .

 

The problem with celebs, and I haven't read the article so I can't comment on its content, is that they are either slumming (or perceive themselves to be) and do a shitty job of it, or they are so hyped-up that it becomes distracting from the game itself. I'm thinking specifically of Haley Joel Osment in Kingdom Hearts, as I always associate Sora with him and not as his own character. Possibly that's just me. Tobey McGuire's valium-sponsored vo's for Spider-Man come to mind too .

 

Personally I prefer having voice-over artists do it, so much more used to the medium and able to do some serious emoting when not bound by doing children's entertainment. Look at Jim Cummings as Minsc: Cummings does more cartoon voices than almost anybody on the planet and he still makes Minsc his own character. Mark Hamill in Gabriel Knight also comes to mind.

 

That's not to say that celebrities can never do good work. Mitch Pileggi did a fantastic job in Planescape, you'd never know it was him from the way his character sounds. There are others, and I haven't heard the KOTOR voices, but give me a good stable of voice actors versus celebrity flavor-o-the-month any day.

[iainl]

Well, I still think it should go the other way, and rather than giving as a third outing of 5 minutes of gameplay hidden between 20 minute cutscenes, Kojima should just cast David Hayter in a live-action Metal Gear movie.

[dogbert]

Voice acting for games can be a pain and more trouble than it's worth. A lot of actors out there aren't used to the "demands" of game voiceover work & as mentioned, treat it as if they're slumming it so don't listen to the directions they're given. The result is monotone useless clips that lack the emotion & delivery needed for the particular in-game situations.

 

I expect a lot more games to hire people from the cartoon voiceover industry & famous name "soundalikes" because they're cheaper & more flexible than their big name counterpart.