Power Pros Forum

http://www.members.aol.com/djjackd/about.html

So, color me curious, but I wanted to know why a little-known guy named Jack Merluzzi was the commentator for every single game in MLB power pros - regular season, all-star game, all thru the playoffs - heck, even the College Kings championships. This fictional announcer is all about baseball announcing - and does it without a partner. Incredible. The proverbial iron man of repetitive loop-based announcing.

So I dug around the series of tubes known as the Internets, and found Merluzzi-san in a few low-grade anime adventures, doing voices. Eventually, thanks to Google, I found the lad's AOL home page above. So now I can IM Jack at midnight, and ask him why he is so f***ing excited about my infield pop ups.

A list of good things about Jack Merluzzi:

• He is ballsy enough to use his own name for an entire video game release
• He has a decent radio/announcing voice
• He can feign excitement at the smallest of events (which should make conversation with chicks easier)
• He is brave enough to move overseas and start a new life in Tokyo

A list of bad things about Jack Merluzzi:

• Apparently living in the US for 32 years wasn't enough to learn how to pronounce names like 'Glavine' (Gla-veen? really, Jack?)
• He did not take the time to study any last name pronounciation, as in going over video highlights, Wikipedia pages, or baseball-reference.com to perform his job better (or just being a passable baseball fan)

So D- for lack of effort on the names, considering your voice is now thundering through speakers all around the US, as boys from age 8 to 38 try desperately to win japanime girl's fictional hearts

But B+ on your personal talent and execution, making what could be excrutiatingly horrible after one week somewhat more tolerable, despite the high-pitched excitement over my right fielder 'coming in!'.

I was laughing all through reading this, especially that! LOL!

Haha! Very funny alloutwar!

Genius

Hey, you should hit him up to do a "celebrity interview" for the site, with you as the reporter asking questions

And you can ask him how in the world he mispronouces names like Glavine AKA Glaveen!

and pronounce kotsay ko-see

"Strikeout! That's some good pitching from, GLAVEEN!"

Don't be knockin on Jack, he can power listen!

(according to this page go down to education material)

...and I think we already knew about the power speaking

Okay...give me a day or two to work up the guts, but I'm going to email Jack and ask if he'd just answer like 5-10 questions about MLB power pros - working with the developers, the experience, if he is a baseball fan, etc.

I'm not sure I want to reference the website- I honestly don't want him to see this page and see my silly post above. But if he agrees to just spend 15-20 minutes crafting responses, how cool would that be?

I'll let him know that we're developing a fan appreciation community over here, and that his voice is booming out of our TVs every day!

Not mine, I only plug in the video cable for the ps2. But tell him he definitely chose a great game to be in, only if he knew how to pronounce some names.

If you were an ocean away from where the action is, and without proper reference material (thanks to the oversight by Konami) it's hard to guess how to pronounce names... and he probably over guesses some of them.

Well...I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt and all...even living in the US for most of his life, maybe he wasn't a baseball fan. So 'Tom Glavine' isn't something he heard everyday - that's understandable.

I'll buy that he was in Tokyo, the production was rushed, and maybe he was the only one that spoke English. Fine. All that being said, I can understand some misprononciations (Uggla, etc). Some are just off the wall completely, but still.

The real fault lies in the lack of play testing/UAT/QA time, with a baseball fan knowledgeable in the sport, preferably speaking english. also, wouldn't this game have to pass through some MLB/players union guys? testing to make sure they don't (gasp) use actual dollars and whatever? I think it's odd that so many of these went uncaught.

Jack is just a voice, so we can't blame him (although for real bad guesses, it is tempting), ASSUMING there was a rush. But with this wonderful internet, and the ability to listen to game audio from anywhere, even watch games on mlbTV - heck, even reference Wikipedia pages for correct pronounciation of the oddball names...either an analyst in Tokyo should be doing that, or Jack should take a week and learn the pronunciations of all the trouble ones. He's like an actor, and actors have to study the part to be good at their craft. No?

When I rag on the announcing, I'm typically blaming the programmers rather than the voice (Merluzzi). Yeah, the mispronunciations are on Jack, but honestly that should be found and fixed in basic development QA. They shouldn't have ever made the final product. But triggering the wrong announcing calls for the situation like we love to laugh at is all on the programmers.

Kind of like.... " thats a routine Routine groundball " When i hit a friggin popup in to center!

And " Hit in the air " when i ground out to short!

And "Hit behind second" when i hit it to left?

Now thats just funny!

Yah, I get that a lot too - but that's all on development. Poor triggering of the voice calls, which leads to the wrong sound bit being played.

Speaking of which, did that get improved in '08?