Journalists were given about 20 minutes with Mr. Taylor (pictured, left) during the junket for a roundtable Q&A. Naturally, I had to let the TV critics get their questions in and most of the roundtable was really Taylor performing for us – going back and forth between the various celebrity voices he doubles for in animated series and movie trailers.

But eventually I got to ask a few video-game related questions. The first being, "Who's your favorite video game character you've voiced?"

This turned out to be a tough question for Taylor. Unlike dubbing for cartoons and movies where you either get to act out the lines with other actors like a radio play (Clone Wars), or only have a few lines at a time to cover for a movie trailer (Batman Begins, I think), video game dubbing is long and lonely work. Taylor said the script for Final Fantasy X was as thick as a phonebook and he'd do six hour sessions completely by himself in a recording studio.

It's pretty grueling work – but it also makes you bond with your character the way you would with a child. So it was hard for Taylor to choose just one video game character as his favorite.

"I love the Ratchet & Clank series," he said, referencing the upcoming Crack In Time that he just voiced. "But Tidus from the Final Fantasy series really put me on the map." Even now, almost 10 years since that performance, he's still getting fan mail for it.

For my part, I prefer him as Ratchet. Maybe I say that, though, because I first bonded to his voice as a QA tester on Size Matters. I spent almost three months listening to his every line over and over again, making sure the subtitles were accurate.

You can catch Taylor's most recent video game performance when Star Wars The Clone Wars: Republic Heroes hits shelves October 6, or wait a few weeks and pick up Ratchet & Clank: A Crack in Time.

P.S. He voices the Fox Animation Domination TV bit and I never would have believed that if I hadn't heard him say the lines right in front of me.

Image Cred

When they first announced that The Old Republic would be fully-voiced during E3 2009, those of us involved in the more massively-multiplayer side of gaming collectively gasped. The average MMO title has players interacting with hundreds of different characters over the course of the game. Providing real voices for each of those characters as well as the player characters themselves is a monumental task.

As I said, The Old Republic is the size of at least 10 KOTORs recorded back to back. Basically, it takes a very large team all focused on the same outcome - producing the most VO assets ever produced at the highest quality possible. There are dedicated internal teams at both LucasArts and BioWare, and externally, there are also multiple studio audio engineers and post production teams. On any given day, there can be over a dozen people working specifically on The Old Republic voice-over and that doesn't include any actors!

And there are hundreds of actors working on the project, with recording spanning four cities - Los Angeles , London, New York, San Francisco, and Toronto. The most staggering statistic? When last we checked, the game had surpassed the amount of dialog in the entire run of The Sopranos. According to Perry, the script for the game as it now stands contains enough material for more than 40 Star Wars novels. That's completely insane.

Check out the full blog post to get an idea of how much work poor Shauna is being put through in order to make Star Wars: The Old Republic the most talkative MMO ever created.

Developer Blog #10 [Star Wars: The Old Republic]

As revealed this weekend, Milano was tapped to play the lady part in the new games, replacing Sigourney Weaver, who apparently didn't believe in the project hard enough. I'm having a bit of a hard time imagining Milano as the love interest of Bill Murray's Venkman, partly because Murray is pushing 60, and partly because she's mine, dammit. You think I watched the entire runs of Who's the Boss and Charmed because they were quality television programs?

Check out the screens below, which cover both her cartoonish Wii appearance and her more lifelike PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 incarnation, while I scrawl out some more disturbing fan letters.

I picked up my copy of God of War II on Tuesday and rushed home to open it and was greeted with a disc of extras along with my copy of the game. While most people would dive right in to the game, for me that extras disc was like video game foreplay. I quickly slipped it into the PS2 and was thrilled to see that one of the first things on the disc was interviews with some of the voice actors. And there, in the menu image was none other than Linda Hunt herself.

The interviews were short and sweet and highlighted some of the more well known actors in the group:

T.C. Carson, the voice of Kratos himself has done a ton of VG voice over work in games like Saints Row and Star Wars Battlefront II, but began his career as a regular on Living Single.

Linda Hunt, who voices the Narrator and Gaia has appeared in many films and TV shows and even won an Oscar Award for her portrayal of a Filipino man in The Year of Living Dangerously.

Michael Clarke Duncan as the voice of Atlas is no stranger to VG voice over work either although you may remember him best as the eyepatch wearing Manute in Sin City or "that big guy from The Green Mile."

And finally, in a coup that's sure to titillate the Clash of the Titans fans out there (myself included), Harry Hamlin reprises the role he made famous in COTT by providing the voice of Perseus.

The interviews are great and interestingly, when questioned, not one of them actually plays games. Several of them also talked about the difficulty of recording these voiceovers when they really don't have a lot to go on as far as plot and motivation and other such actory things.

So, if you can manage to tear yourself away from the game, take a minute to check out that extras disc which in addition to the voice over interviews also includes character concept art, scenery art and several other goodies. And who knows, if you're not careful, you might just learn something! (Points if you get that reference) Flynn De Marco