Agree to Disagree.

November 03, 2003, 11:26 am

From an interview with Xbox guys on EGM:

EGM: You've mentioned before about Nintendo games not using voice as a sign of them being stuck in the past...

EF: I remember [listening to a Q&A session] with [Nintendo President Satoru] Iwata and [Mario and Zelda creator Shigeru] Miyamoto, and someone asked them why none of their games had voices. And they talked about cost and the time and trouble to localize it to different countries... and I just felt like I was listening to silent-movie directors talking [about how films work fine without sound]. Yeah, it costs more and it's a pain, but that's now a part of making games. I feel like that's just part of the price of doing business nowadays, and it's something everyone should be doing. It's something people should expect from games. We should all be pushing the art form ahead.

Yeah, I think I'm going to have to, um, disagree with you here.

I find most voice acting in videogames to be horrible. And most times, I really don't want to hear it. I am especially annoyed when games impose their crappy voice acting by not allowing you to skip past parts.

I don't think voice acting is necessarily the future of videogames. That's like saying that books-on-tape are the future of books, 'cause who would want to bother with old “paper” technology?.

Just because you can do something, doesn't mean that you ought to do something.