From: LifeLine
Genre: Video Games
Who said it?: Rio
The story behind the quote: This quote actually comes from an Easter Egg from Lifelife for the Playstation 2. This survival horror game from Konami is remembered because it was a good game (most reviews gave it an average score). Rather, what made his PS2 game memorable was its unique control scheme.
It takes place in the future where you are attending a party in a hotel that is orbiting the Earth. The festivities are abruptly put on hold due to invasion of alien monsters. Your character gets trapped in the control center of the space hotel. Your character manages to make contact with another survivor named Rio (voiced by Kristen Miller). However, you can only communicate with her by actually talking to her.
As mentioned, the game was pretty different from other survival horror games because of the way you control Rio. The player cannot use the controller to issue orders to Rio. Rather, you would have to use a PS2 USB microphone and give the commands by talking to her. The concept was good… but the execution was bad. The game simply couldn’t keep up, especially if you issue commands hurriedly. However, using your voice to control the onscreen character was used in weird ways, especially with the aforementioned quote.
At any time during the game, you can command Rio to bark like a dog for no reason at all. The weird thing is that the developers actually thought of this and Rio has a response for it!
The video below has Adam Sessler reviewing (and blasting) the game. You can skip to 2:03 of the video to here the sequence and the quote. You can clearly see that Adam didn’t really expect a response!
Geek wisdom: Sometimes, taking a weird and irreverent chance can make you stumble on to something good. In the game, there is really no reason to ask Rio to bark like a dog. It’s something generally something someone would do on a whim… and it actually works!
We can get too focused on our own lives and get too serious. Because of this, we forget that being spontaneous and irreverent… just doing something for no reason… can also be fun. Let your hair down once in a while… and bark like a dog for no reason.