Monster Party for the NES. Fun game, lots of levels, interesting and outlandish bosses, monsters that make you go "wtf?", but those few words in the game... I remember thinking as a kid "That was brutal. Aunt Betty had better have gotten me the best game to play ever."

I make these mistakes all the time, at least while writing. 

"In fact"
"Actually"
"the reason is because" <-- just plain wrong.
"basically"

Strangely, I don't make these same mistakes while speaking.  Although my behaviour, in-person, is quite eccentric for other reasons. 

These are common filler words. If you really want to learn to stop using them (and about writing in general), I would recommend reading "Getting the Words Right" by Theodore A Rees Cheney. Its one of the great bibles of writing that I think everyone needs to own, even if they don't write creatively.

I agree with you 100% on "the reason is because". Just the redundancy of the phrase irritates me.

You are a particularly deadly shade of maroon. You're finding it hard to get work these days, as the theory of relativity has just set up shop down the street and is offering services at prices you simply can't match. The only way to settle this matter is to invite him for tea and best him using wits, violence or subterfuge, all lovely weapons you keep in your violence box. You have 24 hours to make it count.

My new goal in life is to own a violence box.

You are Will, the world's greatest Pharmacist. After touring your wholesaler's warehouse and being trapped under a mountain of Lipitor for 2.7 days, you've acquired the ability to fly. As well, your lucky counting spatula has grown to novelty sizes. You now set off alone to defend the city from criminals.

Giving and enemy/villain a goal does wonders for likeablility. Also, playing up the fan service card a little bit helps, too. Don't go nuts, but a touch of the common and identifiable in a character brings the player closer to them.

I think a lot of what stems bad writing in video games comes from games being influenced by either other video games, or by action movies that have bad writing. The other problem is that a lot of games (at least the ones I play) are translated from another language, and things get lost in translation.

Games influenced by other games have an obvious problem: They were influenced by old games where the plot wasn't a big deal (modern shooters especially). In today's story driven market, you can't just give a three page introduction in the instruction manual and then expect the player to see two or three cut scenes through a 12+ hour game, then have them wait out the ending. ADD takes over and then you have to show interactions between characters. An intricate plot has to unfold, and most game companies seem to really struggle with the concept.

Turning a good movie into a game or using good movies as a basis for a game doesn't work, because movies that have a good plot and make you want to watch inherently don't have enough action to make a game interesting to play. So when you take influence from a movie, it has to be an action thriller with wooden actors and one line deliveries. As more plot is added, the pace slows down, which gives the potential for the player to not want to continue. This creates new problems: How much plot is just enough to keep the player hooked? Does the cut scene take away the tension you've created in the gameplay? Are there cut scenes that are keeping the intensity of the game going?

Translated games have a whole different set of hurdles. I'm sure most of us here have played old SNES RPGs and action games from Japan. They all seem so smooth and well put together for the most part. But there are a lot of things that get translated that might have taken hours or even days to make the scene make sense in english.

To be honest, I don't think many game companies hire people that really know how to write to write the dialogue/monologues because they aren't usually the type to collaborate.

Hello. I'm Scott, a 27 year old gamer and writer.

I started at 3 with a ColecoVision playing Buck Rogers and DK Junior. When I was 6, my mom bought my brother a NES, and he taught me how to Play FF1 by essentially telling me how to do everything when I got to the end of each part (You've done that, now go here, get to this level, buy these things, etc.). This gave me a love of RPGs, and I played any one I could get my hands on. I was into other games as well, but I'd drop anything for an RPG. When I was 11, we got a SNES, and my parents bought me a good handful of games, and I rented enough games to kill a large animal with their combined weight. At the same time as that love affair went on, we got a computer. I started getting into DOOM and Build Engine games, which were most of the popular releases of the time. I played mainstream titles like Warcraft and Diablo, and the Heroes of Might and Magic series (which I still play #3 today. I like to use the map making system as a medium for stories I can't bother to describe with lots of words).

Now I'm working on a quiet game project with a friend, and hope to get some writing credits under my belt.