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Games and Fear

Posted by Zonk on Tue Oct 31, 2006 03:37 PM
from the wumpus-still-scares-me dept.
Entertainment Games
Happy Halloween, game folks. There are a couple of creepy-themed game articles floating around the web today, and they're all lists ... disturbingly. eToyChest gives us the top five most horrifying moments in games. Next Generation offers a ten-point guide to inspiring fear in games. And finally, GameTrailers.com has an entertaining top ten scariest games list, complete with video. Even if I don't agree with some of their placements within the list, I think their #1 is a pretty accurate pick.
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  • Max Payne, the crying baby hallucination level... scares the crap out of me still.

    And the first time I played Quake 1 home, alone, in the dark.

    -Rick
    • Quake was pretty scary the first time. Diablo, when I played it for the first time, seemed pretty scary(I think it came out when I was only about 14.)
    • The sound was all that level had going for it, though. The "running through the trail of blood" puzzle was just annoying.

      On the other hand... man, the sound was freaky.
    • System Shock 2 is very scary. One of the things that makes it scary is the fact that enemies spawn randomly. You're always on guard because they could come from anywhere at any time. Then there's the spiders (including but not limited to stealth spiders), zombies and creepy CP30-esque droids ("sir, where are you?" and so on).

  • Remember the Alien TC for Doom? (Score:3, Informative)

    by El_Smack (267329) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @03:47PM (#16663981)
    I don't think you hit an alien till about the 3rd level, but it was in a dark hallway and he came out of a hidden spot.
    I think I crapped my 256 color, 320 x 240 pants.
    • Absolutely best mod ever. My roommates in college made me play with a surround sound system and in the dark...

      For anyone who's interested, I found a link for it here [cdrom.com], although it doesn't seem to be working, at least not from my job.

      If anyone does find a working link, share with us please?

  • F.E.A.R. is a scary FPS. The horror did sag a bit in the middle by not being there as much. I'm going to finish playing and get the expansion pack.
      • Totally. I was actually more afraid of using ladders than anything else in that game after than point.

        Although I have to admit the full screen bloodied face didn't exactly do me any favours either. But that was a cheap scare, and it more pissed me off than proper scared me.
      • That and when walking in the office building I turned a corner around a cubicle. It had been a long while since I had seen the girl and wan't thinking about it one bit. I swivel to check out the cube for anything of interest and BAM, she's there crawling like that creepy chick from 'The Ring', only faster.

        One of the scariest moments I've had in a video game was also playing Doom I. There was an Aliens mod that replaced the monsters with different aliens from the movies, and replaced a ton of the sounds

  • my scariest video game moment (Score:3, Funny)

    by JeanBaptiste (537955) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @03:50PM (#16664017)
    looked something like this

    .......
    .......
    ..@.c..
    .......
    .......


    Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 3.6).
  • But a couple of the scariest moments I can think of come from first person shooters. Like the discovery of the Flood in Halo, or in Unreal where you walk down a hallway and all of the lights systematically shut down, leaving you to face a Skaarj in the dark!
    • I'd say in Half-Life in the reactor with that gigantic green spiked tentacle. With the lights off, speakers on full, and no one else in the house. I spent a good bit of time cursing that stupid thing.....I was out of grenades and couldn't distract it, so I had to do it the hard way.

      Layne
    • Pfft, try doing the same in Zork.
  • Well, one of TFAs is not responding, another requires flash...

    But I will say that there is NOTHING scarier than "It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue."

    Because eventually, if you keep messing around in the dark, it's going to happen... and only your imagination limits how terrible a grue is. This game experience was why I demanded my parents install a nightlight.
  • Oh well.

    I haven't gamed in a good many years (the occasional hop onto the 'family' PC to play my kids' copy of The Sims doesn't count), so I'm sure I've missed out. However, the only *truly* frightening experience I ever had was while playing the Doom TC Aliens conversion, in the dark, with a good set of headphones. I can't count how many times I jumped while playing that game, or held my breath while I hesitated to turn a certain corner.

    So, to anyone who remembers the Doom mod I mentioned above.. do

  • Hearing those skinless howler money things come ratling up the drainpipes *still* freaks me out a little.
    • no freakin' kidding.

      HL1 was, until HL2, the most immersive, pulse-pounding FPS-with-a-storyline I'd ever played. HL2 outdid it in every way.

      Ep 1 was pretty darn good as well. Looking forward to Ep 2!
    • Yeah... although I have to say that as soon as the level started, I groaned a little. "Crap. Another one of these "scaaaaary" levels." I'm tired of them.

      And since my computer is pretty much obsolete, the worst thing about the steroid zombie things for me was that by the time I heard one, I knew that my framerate was going to drop to 1 frame every other seconds. *Screeeeech* *rending and slapping sounds, with accompanying slide show*. "Whoops. Guess I'm dead."
    • Their is only one chapter I don't play in HL2 anymore: Ravenholm. I play the intro chapter, the boat chapter, and the jeep chapters much much more. The howlers...grabbing onto my car in ep 2? That'll be frightening!

      Not surprising, Father Grigori is by far my favorite character...

  • Picture it: 2am in a thunderstorm after having drank WAYY too much coffee. It's exam routine for finals, and you're playing Metal Gear Solid 2:Sons of Liberty... you're hopelessly addicted to it, and desperately need to finish the damned game so you can get some studying done... you're near the end and... the game starts going all crazy.

    Suddenly the screen turns itself off and then on, and then the colonel says "You've been playing the game a long time, haven't you?"

    I nearly had a fucking heart attack...

    • Yeah that freaked me out a bit when the guy says "haven't you been playing too long" and "seriously you need to step away from the console" or whatever. I thought the game was going to quit because I played it too long or something, I was having virtual boy flashbacks and I had been playing for about 10 hours without getting up. I just did this like a week ago, and only on very easy, because I am big dumb gaijin, or more to the point since I hit the age of about 13 or 14 I had better things to do than to pl
      • Don't get me wrong, there are tons of games that scared me in the same way that someone jumping out behind me yelling "GOTCHA!!" does... but never has a game actually freaked me out more than that... I think maybe it was the stress, the lack of sleep and the retarded amounts of coffee I was drinking... but I was like "ZOMG MY PS2 IS POSSESSED!!11oneone" ... sounds stupid, but I've never been more freaked out by a video game than that time.
        • That was pretty much my experience too. Playing that game for too long makes you paranoid, for obvious reasons - the whole "government agent" genre always includes plentiful fucking-overs and backstabbings. So there I sit in the dark, having played for far longer than is healthy, and the console starts babbling at me in crazy people talk.
  • Lots of scary games, but I particularly remember playing Alone in the Dark, well... in the dark, and the music and ambiance was excellent despite the old graphics. More recently, doom3 is scary in a different, monster-suddenly-jumps-out-of-the-shadows-when-yo u -least-expect-it kinda way.

    Alien vs. predator also comes to mind.. when the motion sensor starts beeping faster and faster and you can't see a thing and before you know some aliens are kickin' the hell out of you.. just like in the movies (first two I
  • I must not fear.
    Fear is the mind-killer.
    Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
    I will face my fear.
    I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
    And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
    Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
    Only I will remain.

  • Thief: The Dark Project (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Chuckaluphagus (111487) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @04:20PM (#16664611)
    I was playing Thief on a stormy night with a cheap 4.1 speaker setup, because you need some reasonable positional audio for Thief. On the second level, where you're trying to get into the prison through the abandoned mines, I came upon a decayed corpse lying on the ground. First in the game, mind you. After waiting a moment at the edge of the room to see whether it would rise up and try and eat my brains (as decayed corpses are wont to do in such situations), I decided everything was safe and walked right over to it and looked down to see whether it was anything interesting.

    That's when it chose to jump up and take a swipe at me. I screamed bloody murder and yanked the power cable from the back of my computer, turned on all the lights in the apartment and didn't turn the damn computer back on until the next day. For serious immersion in a game, Thief is amazing. Much, much more interesting than most of your regular first-person games. Like a lot of people here, I am a huge fan of Half-Life 2 and Ravenholm, though.

  • The Downtown level I believe. I climbed that one lone tower about half way back. I got to the top and experienced some acrophobia and a lurch of panic in my chest as I got close to the edge that first time. That's probably the only time I was actually scared in a video game.

    Man, that was great!

    Carl
  • A true classic game and pretty scary at times, when you get into the village for the first time when the locals have killed the cops - that was scary.

    As was the bit where you have to kill the zombies who are chasing you and Ashley in the big truck, it's them getting you from behind that get me...

    Oh! and when those walking things are suffling along in a really scary way and you can shot them all you want but they just don't seem to want to die...
  • I've yet to find a game (or series) that freaks me out as much as the Project Zero games.
    I mean, Silent Hill? Resident Evil? I have WEAPONS! Project Zero... a camera, a bloody old camera with no film.

    And that insane ability for them to put dolls everywhere that don't move...
    then there's that one that catches your eye, but doesn't move...
    until you finally put the camera away and decide it's just another doll.
  • Those terror missions really lived up to their name, especially when its set at night/dusk, and in real life its 3 AM, and its you're first time going through the game. Ah yes - memories - the wind blowing at my window, the pulsing soundtrack echoing from the speakers, and the expletives streaming from my mouth the first time a Chrysallid charges out of the black at me, and I just about leaped out of my chair (waking my roommate).

    Those old VGA graphics and tinny sounds had more atmosphere than most horro

  • I'm probably the only person who was scared by this, but the first time I went into the Bottom of the Well it scared the hell out of me. False floors, enemies jumping out of nowhere, and some seriously creepy music...
  • Okay, it's older--but it was damn creepy in its day.

    -Eric

  • Ok, it wasn't that scary, but there were plenty of chances to jump and get surprised in RTCW.

    Aside from San Andreas, probably the last REALLY good single player game I've played.

    rhY

    Doom 3, halflife 2, the other ones were just "eh".
  • I played SH2 before SH1, so I was freaked out more by it. I was expecting a Resident Evil "jump out and scare you" type game but I got something totally different. There really wasn't a specific scary part, but the audio really helped. The whole freaking game scared me. Even at the start when you are walking down the path in the fog I could swear there were footsteps following me... but when you stop, they stop.

    Sometimes while playing I couldn't tell if the controller was rumbling or if I was shaking.

  • Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (Score:4, Insightful)

    by balthan (130165) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @05:42PM (#16665761)
    The Ocean House Hotel was one of the creepiest areas I've ever played in a game.
  • Nobody has mentioned Undying yet. That game scared the crap out of me. The first time I played it my wife made me turn the lights back on because it was scaring her and she wasn't even watching the thing.
  • ... for me personally to find it even remotely scary. I can get creeped out by games in third person, sure (Fatal Frame for example), but I can't get scared to the point I wanna turn the lights on or put the game down unless I'm playing first person, and preferably on a PC (I sit a lot closer to my monitor than I do to my TV, and generally wear headphones).

    Games like FEAR and Thief and Arx Fatalis genuinely scare me (Arx Fatalis is a highly under-rated game, and much creepier/downright scary than has been r
  • LucasArts' Rescue on Fractalus - every time the rescued pilot turned out to be an alien and you couldn't see his little green head running towards the ship. A brief silence where you expect the pilot to knock on the door and BAM - he'd jump up in front of your ship's cockpit and scare the bloody life out of you.

    Fabulous.
  • Surprised no one's mentioned this yet. When the Colonel at the end turns into a skull face and starts ordering you to turn off the game console, and starts talking gibberish. Then you realize that the main character is simply an allegory for you, the player, and that the designer, Hideo Kojima, has spent the entire game building up to this moment to freak you out of your mind.

    At least with "scary games," you're expecting them to be scary. This was a perfectly normal game that suddenly became very differe

  • Original Half-Life (Score:3, Funny)

    by Thornae (53316) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @08:02PM (#16667357)
    This is the only game that made me empty a whole magazine into something I knew was dead, just because it scared the crap out of me.

    Evil story: Years ago, I moved into a sharehouse with a couple of friends. One of them hadn't played HL yet, so I set it up on his machine and left him to it.
    A couple of days later, I came home late at night and saw that the door to his room was open.
    He was playing one of those freaky bits where you're crawling through badly lit ventilation tunnels, and headcrabs jump out of the dark. He was hunched over the keyboard, right into it, with headphones on, with his back to me...

    Naturally, I did what any good friend would do. I sneaked up behind him, grabbed his shoulders and yelled "Hi, Mat!" ...

    He didn't speak to me for a week.
  • I don't know why Doom3 isn't mentioned that much. I still can play only about 10 minutes at the time, although with the sound turned down really low I can muster maybe 20 minutes. It's not the visuals a la 'scary monsters jumping out of the cabinet'. It's the sound. It's the scariest shit I ever heard (especially when played on my massive 5.1 setup with that enormous subwoofer that just seems to emanate low frequency, scary sounds).

    While the gameplay is rather boring and scripted, kudos to the audio engin

  • One of the best horror games ever: Anchorhead (Score:3, Informative)

    by ChaosDiscord (4913) * on Tuesday October 31 2006, @10:36PM (#16668707) Homepage Journal

    It's "just" a text adventure, but it's reach, convincing, creepy, and free. I highl recommend Michael Gentry's Anchorhead [wurb.com] . Your husband has just inherited an old family home from a relative he didn't know he had. You've just moved to Anchorhead. Your husband has gotten a position at the local college. You have a simple task: head over to the real estate agent's office and pick up the keys for your house. Unsurprisingly things go downhill as it turns out that your house and the town have a dark past.

    For anyone new to interactive fiction, you'll need a free interpreter. I recommend Gargoyle [ccxvii.net] on Windows or Linux and Spatterlight [ccxvii.net] on Mac OS X.

    • so how do they pronounce "id" on your planet?
    • It's not iD Software it's id Software [idsoftware.com] and it has always been pronounced just like the word it comes from:

      id [reference.com] -noun Psychoanalysis
      the part of the psyche, residing in the unconscious, that is the source of instinctive impulses that seek satisfaction in accordance with the pleasure principle and are modified by the ego and the superego before they are given overt expression.
      • In at least one or two of id's games, the second letter of the name is capitalized. By the time Doom came out, however, it was all lowercase.

        I spent a couple of minutes trying to google a reference for this, but was unable. Please take my word. :)
        • http://www.mobygames.com/company/id-software-inc/ l ogos [mobygames.com]

          Initially the logo said "ID," which lead some people, myself included, to think it was an acronym or short for "identification." Way back then a lot of people also started writing the name as "iD." I don't think it was ever officially iD though. Looks like on the Wolf 3D box, for instance, they had ID Software, but references in the game say id Software.

          Anyhow, I remember writing iD Software quite a lot when referring to the company during the pre-do
    • When I first bought my Playstation I didn't have money for a memory card, so I played Silent Hill for three days straight until my nerves became so fried I simply had to shut it off.

      More scary games: Alien: Resurrection for the PS1 and the Ravenholm level in Half-Life 2.

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