Gaming's Best Voice Actors Dress Up For Entertainment Weekly's 'Greatest Characters' List
While some magazines bring incisive political commentary and 'Person of the Year' lists, Entertainment Weekly is content merely to entertain you during your week. And what could be easier to keep people looking at your pages than some simple 'Top [somethings] of All Time' lists? Straying away from the usual reports on celebrity movements and reality show drama, Entertainment Weekly's latest list claims to compile the 100 Greatest Characters of the past 20 years (though, very few characters from written fiction made the cut).
Perhaps interspersing game footage with images of celebrities and movie stills would've confused the magazine's readers--or perhaps they just wanted an excuse to go crazy with some costumes. Either way, the articles on game characters Nathan Drake, Kratos, and Niko Bellic actually focus on their respective voice actors, to the point of enacting some pretty serious cosplay. The image above shows off the dynamic trio: the prolific and handsome Nolan North, the musical actor T.C. Carson, and Rockstar's underpaid star Michael Hollick.
The sad part of this news is that, even as a triumvirate of characters in Game Of The Year candidates, they only made #93 in a top 100 list. Master Chief got in at #59, but he was presumably much easier to get into costume--and Lara Croft actually won over even more hearts and *ahem* minds by getting as low as #17. But when you've got Angelina Jolie bringing your characters to life, your game has a much better chance of nearing the sacred spots held by, say, SpongeBob SquarePants or Buffy.
While it's certainly great to see characters like these getting recognition alongside more mainstream bits of drama, it does seem like EW is distancing themselves from the actual struggles and personalities of gaming storylines by focusing on their voice actors. That may be par for the course for pop culture mags, however--and anything that gets us a cocky Nolan North or a shirtless Mr. Carson can't be all bad...
Drake, Kratos, Niko actors dress up for Entertainment Weekly [GamesRadar]
faePuck
Posted to Miscellany, Video Games on 2 June 2010
· Comments (1)
Other stuff like this: entertainment weekly, god of war, grand theft auto iv, michael hollick, nolan north, t.c. carson, top lists, uncharted, voice actors
That list just sounds sad. Even for video game characters they didn't select a decent bunch. Kratos is a horrid character, Nico is a Rockstar stand in of "'good' guy who does nothing but terrible things because terrible people tell him too," and Nathan Drake is...well he's good.I think characters like Harry Mason or Persona 4's Teddy, Naoto, or Kanji all make better characters. But then, I have a huge problem with most characters in games these days anyhow..