Deus Ex: Demonstrating the Damage of Smoking

I've been playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution for the past week now, thanks to Fwiffo. I'm really enjoying it so far, and really love how true it stays to the spirit of the original Deus Ex: crawling through air ducts, sneaking into the women's bathroom, global conspiracies, stealth, hacking, and robots. Wearing your sunglasses at night.

But one thing that really bothers me is the voice of the protagonist, Adam Jensen. His acting is totally fine, it's just that he sounds like he's suffering from emphysema after smoking 5 packs a day. Maybe Adam's near-death experience did some irreparable damage to his voicebox. I understand JC's voice in the first Deus Ex was a little gruff, but it's nothing like this. It hurts listening to Adam speak.

Operation couldn't break that cigarette addiction

Do all male protagonists need to have voices that sound like sandpaper? At least Macus in Gears of War is clearly doing steroids and taking rockets to the chest. His body is a wasteland. Adam is hardly a gun-toting COG. If anything, the game encourages you to be stealthy, smart, and socially manipulative. Adam was 'fixed' and given X-Ray eyes and social pheromones. He's a social chameleon, but his voice makes people's ears bleed. You think that would have been part of the operation.

Actually, there's one scene where Adam loses his gravel-voice. He's negotiating with his ex-buddy at the Detroid PD, and he picks up a New York style 'cop' accent. It sounded great and really contributed a lot to the feel of that scene. Of course, as soon as that was over, he's back to being his old emphysema'd self.

Deus Ex is great, but I'm really disappointed Adam sounds like every other male lead on the market. Who actually speaks like this?

Speaking of stereotypes, don't even get me STARTED on the Chinese voice-acting....