Weekend GoalsFollow

WoW: Continue to investigate if I want to resub. The leveling experience has gotten quite a bit worse since Cata, and I have altitis, so I'm starting to lean towards no. But we'll see.

RL: Blissful nothing.

Other games: Will probably play some Skyrim at some point. And I've been trying out LOTRO and having fun.

WoW - about 5k from exalted with flying serpeant and will edge closer to revered with shieldwall. Valor grind as usual, after lunch today should have about 620 valor points, so need the other 380 ... probably will not have a whole lot of time to play this weekend, so will level my priest as I can and clear out a few old instances for grins/gold.

RL - kid free tonight so drinks/dinner/movie with the wife; saturday is step-daughter's baby shower, so have to prepare and decorate for that. After the shower go pick up some fence sections for produce protection in our backyard (dogs trample everything) and then home to relax. Sunday will be the usual quiet day of clearning/wow/couch.

Jennifer Hale's voice acting is so much better than Mark Meer's, it's ridiculous. I've been slowly working through a Paragon MShep run (still on ME1), and it's just so jarring to compare the two. It's not even that Meer's acting is bad, it's just that Hale's is so good.

Oh, hey, didn't they just release a new patch for ME3 multiplayer? I'll need to look into that.

I only ever hear people preferring him for Renegade--I can't comment, because I haven't seen side-by-side comparisons of the two. But I thought Hale pulled off Shepard's badassery extremely well in ME3. I've generally found the Renegade dialog to be worse than the Paragon dialog, though, with both acting and writing.

And like I said, I'm not even saying that Meer is bad, but the overwhelming consensus is that Hale was way better. Meer's voice generally lacks the same diversity and depth of inflection that Hale's has. It sounds more monotone and robotic compared to hers. For the paragon stuff in particular, that tends to be pretty huge. I always felt like Hale's voice actually expressed the fact that Shepard cared. I'm finding that it's not nearly as true with Meer.

Of course, at the end of the day, to each their own.

I just found a side by side comparison of ME2 Renegade voices from the Samara club sequence.


There are times I think Meer does better, but in general I prefer Hale by a huge margin. The part where they're insulting the Krogan, in particular, shows it (1:28). Meer sounds like he's stating a fact. It's fine, not bad. But Hale's acting is actually threatening. It's gentler and softer, which actually makes it feel more threatening. It doesn't feel like false brovado, it feels like she's inviting the Krogan to try something. It's a Black Widow kind of badass.

Meer always just sounds so monotone. There's never any variation in his voices, so it never feels like the character is actually reacting to a situation.

Happy birthday!