No Onimusha 2?

Not on top 5 of all time. Top 10 definately, and the best game of last year.

Silent Hill 3 is going indeed. It's...

Well, I really liked Silent Hill 2. It had its downsides, but on the whole, it was an atmospheric and fairly solid game. Spooky as all hell, too.

Silent Hill 3, on the other hand is... it's like a collection of technically competent images and sounds that conform to a generic understanding of what is scary, ie. it's got blood and monsters, quality sound effects and disturbing situations in it.

But like the previous game in the series, it suffers from being disjointed and incoherent. Half the time, you don't know why the character is saying or doing these things -- they're more or less random and obviously designed to be meaningful or foreshadow things or whatever, but they come off as stale and empty, or completely inappropriate to the situation at hand. After seeing dozens and dozens of terrible monsters and slaughtered innocents, Heather finds a mutilated body. "Who could have done this?" she muses. Well, let's see, could it be one of those endless hordes of evil walking abortions that you've been taking that shotgun to? Could that maybe in some remote way be a viable possibility? As far as I'm concerned, all this isn't exactly a hallmark of intelligent game design. Furthermore, the camera and the controls are really, really awful, which -- for whatever reason -- still appears to be a staple of the survival horror genre. Struggling with the game's user interface instead of the game's content doesn't make for an immersive experience.

Unlike the previous game, which suffered from much of the same problems, however, Silent Hill 3's atmosphere just isn't strong enough to elevate it above all of that. Silent Hill 2 worked, despite all that. It was scary and engaging and cool. The third one isn't really any of these things.

Which doesn't mean that it's a terrible game. We're still playing it and having a reasonably good time with it, but for the most part it's not scary. It's more like a tactical exercise where the main character, whose seemingly endless stupidity makes me wish she would shut the hell up (admittedly, crappy translation may be a factor here, and the godawful voice acting most certainly is), runs clumsily around, shoots or avoids monsters and solves meaningless puzzles in order to get to the next cutscene where people say pretentious shit that doesn't really signify anything. Considering how many cool stretches the previous game had, despite its faults, it's just no comparison.

Still, there are some really cool moments that make playing worthwhile. The thing with the mirror and the tub was pretty jarring, for example. It's just that there's no motivation to feel anything but annoyance with the characters. I don't give a damn if Heather lives or dies or laughs or cries, as long as I complete the game and see the ending, which, more likely than not, will not have enough impact to make me care.

I'm hoping the fourth installment in the series proves to be better. The concept, at least, is intriguing.

Silent Hill 3: thought as much. You said pretty much everything I thought as well. For me the worst part was that James in SH 2 always felt to be under threat -Heather on the other hand fears nothing, does not care for other people (unlike James) and is way, way too tough in combat.

You did change the controls to 3D instead of 2D, I trust? That is one of the best parts of SH series compared to Res Evil.

I just played the Jap version of SH 2 here at work (director's cut, no less) with Japanese speaker translating, and it was so much better -localisation teams have a lot to answer for.

Yeah, changing the controls was the first thing I did. Honestly, if I couldn't do that, I would've given up on the game after about fifteen minutes.

Localized games in particular tend to be pretty awful. I doubt most of the voice actors who get to dub this or that relatively obscure (ie. anything that doesn't happen to be Final Fantasy Whichever or some other guaranteed major hit) title have any actual acting experience; judging by how they usually sound, someone's saving money by using the questionable abilities of friends and family. I'd really prefer it if I had the chance to use the original Japanese audio. I have no doubt that Silent Hill 2 (or 3, for that matter) is vastly improved in the original language. Then again, I'm opposed to dubbing just about anything; anybody who isn't willing to read subtitles should be beaten about the head repeatedly with burlap sacks filled with dead puppies.

Speaking of localization, I recently played quite a bit of Way of the Samurai 2, which had some of the worst voice acting I've heard in a game in a long time. This, I trust you realize, is not a statement to be made or taken lightly. One woman in particular sounds like a 50-year-old chain smoker who apparently thinks that streeeeeetching eeeeevery wooooord oooooout makes you sound dannnnngerous and seduuuctive, particularly if what you're saying makes no sense whatsoever. God, I wanted to stab her just so that she'd stop raping my ears with the unholy screeching that in her nightmarish world passed for a speaking voice, but the stupid game wouldn't let me.

It's a shame that in most games, there is apparently absolutely no voice direction to speak of, so people pronounce names inconsistently, characters often don't even sound the same from scene to scene, and everything generally sounds awkward. In addition to that, more often than not the dialogue comes off as stilted and jumpy simply because there are long pauses between the lines. Somebody says something, shuts up for two seconds, then he says something else, and after two more seconds someone else responds. It becomes painfully obvious that the brainiacs behind this kind of experiences have zero understanding about -- or interest in -- even the most basic skills of storytelling and characterization.

Couple of quick points:

1) Only way to get a dialogue between characters to sound good is to get the actors into the same room. This is actually really hard, especially if they are big names. On top of that, if lip sync in the game is not dynamic, the voice actors have to compensate, creating awkward pauses.

2) Voice localization is done for one reason, and one reason only: MONEY. Companies would not waste their cash on it (and it is damn expensive) if it did not translate into extra sales.

But then you knew that. :)

To respond to those points:

1) Ahh... no. Voice actors are quite capable of sounding good even if they are not in the same room. Animated movies have proven this for the better part of a century, now. Even today, it's rare for an animated feature to actually have even the principal cast all in the same studio at the same time. (The dialogue in Shrek, for example, was recorded so that the actors all read their parts separately. Monsters, Inc. was rather exceptional in that John Goodman and Billy Crystal were occasionally in the same room when they were doing their scenes, as were Steve Buscemi and Frank Oz. It's really fairly rare.) Of course, it requires good actors and a good voice director; otherwise the end result will not be satisfactory. As for the awkward pauses, it's really rather irrelevant why they are there; they wreak hell on mood and having them removed, particularly from an original language product (as opposed to a localization) should not be a major task for anyone who actually bothers to think about it. (For example, as I recall, your game does not feature these annoying, yet all-too-common pauses. I would go so far as to hazard a guess that if there were any, you would be too quality-conscious to let that kind of crap fly without putting your foot down.)

2) Yeah, money talks, of course. But I really don't have a problem with localization as such, as long as a) it's done well and b) I'm given the option to listen to the original language, which is hardly a major technical feat. Not including the original speech tends to be more a political decision than anything else, these days, particularly as dvd releases are getting to be more of a rule than an exception, so there's plenty of space to go around.

I'll be happy to settle for a), though; games tend to be a little more forgiving about dubbing than movies. I'm still opposed to it on principle, though, just to make sure that nobody sees me being reasonable about something.

One of the more pleasant surprises about the excellent Ninja Gaiden was the ability to listen to the original Japanese dialogue - not that the english version was too badly done either.

But I had the pleasure of trying out the American version. I don't know if us Europeans will be treated to such niceties, and in any case the game will be censored here :-( Unfortunately the game industry still has a long way to go in giving the developers' hard work the respect it deserves.

Mikki: completely agree on point 1, voice actors SHOULD be professional enough to do the voices in isolation, but in my experience you cannot count on that. This simply is not seen very important in the games industry at the moment –though I think the trend will be changing.

As for our project, we were blessed by having a dedicated sound director who actually cared about voice direction, and code that modifies the talk animations and lip sync automatically to match the language being used. This was mainly due the fact the this portion of the games development did not interest that many Powers That Be, so we could do it as we saw fit.

Point 2 is a bit more complex: Getting the original language with subtitles costs money -admittedly not as much as dubbing, but dubbing is seen to add lots of sales unlike subbing. Subtitling is seen as annoying extra cost, not as a feature. But before publisher politics change, subtitles in games are going to be few and far between.

Hakkis: Only the richest, most famous developers have any protection against publisher’s tantrums. The management team in the publisher side has ALL the power when making most games, and they know it. We developers make enough mistakes on our own, and at the moment you must add their mistakes and ‘creative input’ into the mix. Note that not all of it is negative, but lots of it is.

I’ve liked the discussions on this subject –I must write an entry on these issues alone at some point.

I just remembered a wonderful game that I got completely addicted to some years ago -- to the point that I began dreaming of bouncing off of suspended steps. I had never signed up and paid for a game before so it was a big thing to sign up for a lifetime membership. It's very different from other games I have played - and it definitely gets you hooked. So think twice before you click:
http://www.tqworld.com/

You can't count on the actors? Sure you can. If you hire cheap bastards with a lousy work ethic and/or questionable skills, the end result's going to suck. If you hire competent professionals, chances are you get decent work. And I would have to say that passable or even competent voice acting in games isn't that uncommon; certainly not so uncommon as to be a blight on the game industry in general.

Indeed, I don't think it's markedly worse than acting in movies in general; it's just that when a movie is full of bad acting, critics take notice, whereas bad acting in games is generally met with a shrug. Gamers just aren't a particularly sophisticated -- or at least discerning -- audience, as far as that goes.

(Then again, considering that stories so bad even Hollywood wouldn't greenlight that kind of crap are routinely passed with a collective shrug in the games industry, maybe this isn't all that surprising -- who cares that the voice acting is bad, when everything these characters spit out is simply senseless verbal diarrhea? Never mind that! Look, we got tits and polygons! Polygon tits, even! Incidentally, you are interchangeable with just about any other game character, suffer from amnesia and are referred to as the One, because you have a Destiny! It's all terribly mysterious, and EPIC!)

Mikki, I think you hit the nail on the head, but if the money is not there to hire good actors, then you have to make do with poor ones. Good ones can cost anywhere around 2000-5000 £ per hour. That's a lot of money in the games industry.

Not that I am disagreeing with any of your points: quite often problems in this field are due the fact that no-one in the project really, truly cares that much about VO/acting/script. It should not be so, but it sometimes is.