Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread!

Last month, I… well, “enjoyed” is far from the right word, but I tried Crackdown 3. It wasn’t great! There wasn’t much in the way of things that appealed to me, but there was something I did find interesting. Namely, Terry Crews. He shows up in first cutscene, says some deeply inane dialogue, flexes, and then he gets shot in the head and dies. This came after a marketing campaign that plastered him front and center. So, essentially, what we have here is a game that tried to leverage the limited availability of an A-list star as a sort of terrible meta joke and advertisement. The slightest of slight of hands. I’ve enjoyed a lot of Crews’ work; this was not that.

Crews was, at the time, the latest in a long line of big celebrity casting choices in video games. And he was far from the last; I started Yakuza: Like a Dragon yesterday, and that features George Takei in a plumb role. Takei has been great so far. He’s a satisfying member of the Like a Dragon cast and uses his age and experience wonderfully. And there are plenty of others throughout gaming history. Remember when Deep Space Nine’s Armin Shimerman and René Auberjonois both played Howard Hughes analogues in BioShock and Fallout: New Vegas? Or Martin Sheen creeping it up in Mass Effect 2? And I’ve heard good things about Queen Latifah as the narrator of Sayonara Wild Hearts. These actors and the games that cast them exploit these actors’ celebrity and lean on them, creating something that has a bit of meta power but only exploits that to further excellent work.

But these are far from the only examples, and many are not so good. Kingdom Hearts in particular is notorious for almost transcendently miscast and misused actors, be they Billy Zane as the immortal scientist / boat Ansem to Lance Bass as Sephiroth to so many A-list Disney actors trudging their way through awful dialogue. And while Martin Sheen and plenty of Mass Effect actors did fine, just take one look at Mass Effect Andromeda and you’ll see the likes of Clancy Brown, Kumail Nanjiani, and oodles of Game of Thrones actors just wasted. Call of Duty’s got plenty, including Idris Elba in one of his earliest “dear lord, this is beneath you!” roles and Kevin Spacey as a guy who wants to own all cyborgs or something.

I have particular little interest in debating the value of this practice. Stunt casting has existed forever. It has its ups and its downs. I don’t think it’s useless by far and think that the best uses of it speak for themselves. I also don’t think you can ignore how spectacularly poorly it can go. Instead, I put to you this: what are your favorite—and least favorite—examples of stunt casting in games? I don’t care about the middle ground here, just the absolute pinnacle and the absolute pits. I want to marvel at amazing celebrity work and gawk at the delightfully embarrassing. Make me aware and laugh, and also do make sure to point out how weird it is that Wallace Shawn gives, like, the best performance in the entire Kingdom Hearts series as Rex the dinosaur from Toy Story who really loves the fake version of Final Fantasy XIII Versus.

And, as always, what did you play this weekend? And remember that Lily Bones’ “Game News Roundup” just game out! So read it!