Best & Worst Amateur Voice Acting in a Mod?

[Jack Of Owls]

What's the best voice acting you ever heard in a mod for a PC game or whatever? My vote goes to SlyFox for his remarkable impression of Garrett for a huge number of mods for Thief I & II. You could probably stick his voice in the midst of a professional Thief game and no one would be the wiser. The Worst Amateur Voice Actor Award goes to that collective group of amateur voice actors that try to do foreign or exotic accents and sound like they're doing a bad Arnold Schwarzenegger impression. You know what I'm talkin' 'bout.

 

[unfairlight]

Goldwell voice acts Not Garret For Legal Reasons in The Dark Mod, and he does a pretty good job at it. The issue for a lot of people is that they don't have hardware to do proper acting even if they are good at it.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

The Worst Amateur Voice Actor Award goes to that collective group of amateur voice actors that try to do foreign or exotic accents and sound like they're doing a bad Arnold Schwarzenegger impression. You know what I'm talkin' 'bout.

Skyrim's VA team?

I know Oblivion had a few like that, along with some good ones like that guy who did Argonians in a mod or two. As for doing foreign accents well, it's best when they're actually- well, foreign. There was a companion mod for Obivion by a young Swedish woman who did the voice acting herself and it was quite sweet and comforting hearing her thick northern girl accent as she accompanied me on my journeys.

 

[skacky]

Best voice acting would probably go to Underhell. Not only is it very high quality, but it's well acted and the allied characters are likeable, which is quite the feat. I also think that Rocksbourg 3 has some of the best amateur voice acting I've ever heard.
Worst voice acting? Some of the custom Dungeon Keeper campaigns have some dreadfully bad Richard Ridings-like intros for the levels.

 

[Harold]

Feast your ears

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I just realized that the only game mods I've played that had voice acting in them are all Thief Fan Missions. Or at least game mods where I can remember above-average voice acting took place.

I've probably played some mods with crap voice-acting, and fortunately forgotten about them.

Worse though is the fact that I've played commercial games being sold for $10+ that have horrible, terrible voice acting.

 

[Axe Father]

In my experience, mod voice acting tends to be shit. Mostly because

they don't have hardware to do proper acting even if they are good at it.

but also because the pool of amateur actors that do this sort of thing skews real young which limits the range of characters most of them can play. Slyfoxx as Garrett works because he's an older guy and Stephen Russell (I dunno how old the man is, can't find a DOB) had to at least have been over thirty when he first played the character. It really fucks with the presentation when I'm hearing rosy-cheeked nineteen or twenty year olds trying to sound like grizzled bad asses or fake foreign accents. I played Mental Omega 3.0 a year or two ago and the voice acting was all over the place. Thought some of the units were decent but one that stood out as awful was one of the Allied Air units where what sounded like a British lad of sixteen was trying to sound like a Chuck Yeager flyboy type.

Worse though is the fact that I've played commercial games being sold for $10+ that have horrible, terrible voice acting.

This is only somewhat related, but there a handful of games where mediocre to terrible voice acting actually served well for atmosphere, at least for me. Off the top of my head I can think of both System Shocks, where the average people having the voices of real average people is still refreshing to go back to now that modern games have the constant over acted stylings of your Nolan Norths, Troy Bakers, and Roger Craig Smiths. Another is Silent Hill 2, where the off-kilter acting sort of unintentionally melds with the bizarre circumstances of the characters. Guy Cihi is no voice actor, but he lent some kind of real edge to the main character that is clearly lost when a professional steps into the booth as seen in the HD edition.

 

[zool]

Clan Quest Mod for VtM : Bloodlines is notable for having very good amateur / semi-professional VA - in a game whose VA was praised as one of the very best.

 

[Reinhardt]

and her friends

 

[Sceptic]

There used to be a fan-made campaign for Starcraft called The Antioch Chronicles that had stellar voice acting, on par with the best stuff you heard in Brood War. The production values of that campaign were generally top notch, too bad it was never completed.

 

[Jaesun]

Nothing will EVER top this EVAR. EVAR.

 

[Endemic]

Didn't the Ion Storm devs voice a lot of the characters? Tom Hall = Walton Simons, for example. I agree the foreign accents were very cheesy and silly though.

 

[Icewater]

Nothing will EVER top this EVAR. EVAR.

What a shame.

 

[Cross]

Fuck that scene. They could just have made the padawan a Twi'lek or whatever alien race and used the existing generic voice files.

Still wouldn't have solved the problem of the horrific dialogue. The scene and character in question aren't even cut content, all of it was written by modders. I have no idea what it's doing in a 'restored content' mod.

 

[Endemic]

Meh, I didn't pay much attention to her. Presumably they wanted to explain why the laigreks were overrunning the temple ruins. It sticks out because 95% of the mod does what it says on the tin.

Speaking of which, this was an interesting scene:

 

[kintake]

You also ask for worst voice-acting. My first thought went to the custom campaings made for dungeon keeper, included in keeperfx. Nerds trying to emulate the amazing voice-work of Richard Ridings sends the bad kind of shivers down my spine.
Have a taste, it's quite glorious; https://vocaroo.com/i/s0cSPKL9gakc

 

[Beastro]

This thread needs to be turned more into a "hilariously amusing/endearing bad voice acting" thread.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Nothing will EVER top this EVAR. EVAR.

I spilled my drink watching this.

Voice acting so bad it actually becomes great.

 

[JarlFrank]

Best? Worst? You decide!

 

[Icewater]

I SPEEELL MY DREENK watching this.

 

[thesoup]

Didn't the Ion Storm devs voice a lot of the characters? Tom Hall = Walton Simons, for example. I agree the foreign accents were very cheesy and silly though.

Yeah there were like maybe 3-4 hired voice actors. Rest were iron storm devs. Could have been worse because they at least had Tom Hall who was trained in acting (finished some acting academy) and jay anthony franke, actor turned video game developer (jc and paul denton's voice)

 

[Falksi]

 

[agentorange]

pretty sure all of these actors were japanese people speaking the english lines phonetically

 

[PulsatingBrain]

The VO in New Vegas Bounties was actually decent, but the mic was so bad it totally fucked it up. It didn't bother me though, I thought it was pretty funny

 

[Turtle-Zone 3000]

The voice acting in Deus Ex Nihilum rubbed me the wrong way.