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August 27, 2004Just kick 'em in the Qin!
I bought a secondhand copy of "Prince of Qin" at EB Games yesterday afternoon—a fitting choice, albeit coincidental, seeing as how I caught a screening of "Hero" this morning (which concerns the same approximate era of Chinese history). I've been downloading the 23-MEG patch for the last hour or so. It will fix all manner of bugs and glitches. What it won't fix, unfortunately, is the hideous voice-acting—easily the worst I've ever encountered in a computer game.
At one end of the spectrum, you have the neglected gem, "Torment". It had a mix of celebrity actors and relative unknowns, but everybody did a damn fine job. At the other end, you have "Prince of Qin". All of the text in the game has been translated from Chinese, but poorly. Somewhere along the line, somebody either didn't feel up to the Herculean task of fixing it or else they just didn't care.
Bad writing is a problem, of course, but it's not insurmountable. That’s when good actors shine the brightest—when they take bad (or even just mediocre) copy and turn it into something greater than the sum of its written parts. Did the "Prince of Qin" developers take their reams and reams of "All your base are belong to us"-caliber game copy and have the good sense to hand it over to actual voice actors? Oh, no. Instead, it sounds for all the world as if they just pulled in Bill from accounting and Sally from the QA testers pool and maybe even Henry the night janitor, handed them a script, and told them to have at it. A few of them get the bright idea to recite their lines with a half-assed British accent—y'know, because that's how folks would have sounded in China over 2,000 years ago. Not everybody, though. Just a random sampling.
Voice acting in video games isn't just window dressing anymore. Anybody who played "Warcraft II" for any amount of time has their favorite repeated-click soundbytes, and anyone I've asked about "Baldur's Gate" remembers Minsk's sayings fondly—and often verbatim. Even the bits of voice acting in "Prince of Persia," although scarce, added to its aesthetic appeal. Heck, even the Elmer Fudd-sounding "Wise from you gwave!" intro in "Altered Beast" on the Sega Genesis all those years ago puts "Prince of Qin" to shame. Voice acting aside, though, it’s a fair enough "Diablo" clone. And for $4.50 used, I can hardly knock the price.
Happily, "Hero" more than redeemed my overall Qin-era experience this morning. This is definitely a film I'll want to see in the theater more than once, and I'm not one to want a second helping of just any old movie on the big screen; usually I can wait for DVD easily enough.
You might not believe it, given my "Prince of Qin" rant here and the Paul Hamm rant below, but I've been in a pretty mellow mood lately. I got my new glasses, I have a TAship this upcoming school year, the voiceover work is going well, and life is good. To read this and the entry below, you'd think I've been stomping around, grumbling about everything in my path.
Posted by patrick at August 27, 2004 08:11 PM
CommentsOf course, if you want to refer these bastards to better copywriters, I'm available to fix their crap for $50 an hour... And I can do voice over, too....
Just keeping myself in the loop...
Posted by: Jon Bastian at August 27, 2004 11:11 PM
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