I’m enjoying Fallout 3 quite a bit, but it isn’t perfect. Specifically, the voice acting is driving me crazy. It’s a real earsore.

Thing is, the game actually has a bunch of lines that would be funny if they were delivered with the appropriate timing, or even if they were just text. Instead, it sounds like they got the actors in front of a mic, ran through one take each, and called it a day. It’s badly in need of some editorial oversight.

There’s a particular character in one of the cities, Moira, who speaks in what will forever be known as a a Sarah Palin accent. It’s baffling. I have a hard time imagining how anyone carried a Fargo dialect to Washington D.C. 200 years after a total nuclear apocalypse. I think they were going for Kaylee in Firefly, what with both characters being spunky engineer types, and they took a bad right turn at “Western.”

Bethesda’s first foray into voice acting, Oblivion, was pretty bad in the sound department as well. Fallout 3 seems like a step up from that. At least I’m not having conversations with guys and thinking “Hey, wasn’t this the same actor who voiced that orc a few minutes ago?” (The strange rubbery lip-synching is back in force, but that’s a different subject.) Some of the characters are quite good. Your father sounds fine to me, and of course RON PERLMAN narrates the opening, so you can’t go wrong there..

A game can survive with terrible voice acting. After all, Deus Ex is one of the greatest games of all time, and you can’t call the Hong Kong section anything other than an aural assault. Fallout 3 is hold up well too, even if I’m clicking through all the dialog as fast as I can read the subtitles.

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