Who's Afraid of Shinra Tower?

Amid a lot of talk about how games can affect us emotionally, Lara Crigger at Gamers With Jobs reminds us how a simple trail of blood can affect us if it's couched in the right surroundings. From the article: "Hojo's Lab shows signs of struggle. Shards of glass are everywhere, and lying a few feet from the dais is a mutilated guard. The door to the holding tank is gone, ripped aside and crushed like so much paper; in its place glows a strange Mako light that is simultaneously pink and green. But Jenova - Jenova has evaporated, disappeared but not without a trace: she has crawled out of the laboratory, onto the elevator, and up, and up, and up, leaving behind a wide and thick river of dried blood. I know I have to follow. I do not want to."

Comments

Whatever

[czarangelus]

Slashdot is getting to be like Fark: there's always someone (usually multiple someones) around to crap on someone elses' parade for the sheer malicious joy of doing it. STFU. If you didn't think it was front page material, why did you bother to read the article in the first place? Why did you waste eighteen seconds of your life to tell everyone else how stupid it is? Why can't you just move on without making a snide comment? The same intellectual runoff in every thread is getting kind of dull.

I think it's a great article. I had the exact same reaction the first time I played FFVII, and I think a lot of other people did too. It's also topical - FFVII might itself be old material, but the video game industry is cranking out one unsatisfying suvivial horror after another. So what if it's dated - FFVII did right what a hundred other games have done spectacularly wrong. I think that if a few creative minds in the industry were tipped off to this article, they might reconsider the plot devices used to scare gamers. FFVII was scarier in its places than any Resident Evil I've ever played.

Re:Whatever

[pyrrhonist]

Personally, I was scared when I first fought The End (MGS3).

No kidding. It was creepy when you're trying to find him with your scope, and catch the glint off of his scope. It also freaked me out when I realized that the cut scene showing Snake through The End's scope wasn't a cut scene - you still had to control Snake! It wasn't too hard to actually kill the guy, but it was a very strange boss battle. Next time I'm going to snipe him on the dock so I don't have to go through that again, though. THE EYE! THE EYE!

The Sorrow was probably supposed to be the scariest boss battle, but it ended up being the funniest.

The other battle that creeped me out was the one with The Fury. Somehow a guy in a spacesuit with a flamethrower and a rocket pack in a narrow, dark hallway is bit unnerving, especially when you're trying to knock him out instead of kill him.

I'm looking forward to the remix in MGS3:Subsistence (original MGS3 with first person + network play + the original Metal Gear 1 and 2 + a movie of the cut scenes).

Re:Why?

[88NoSoup4U88]

I agree, since when did Slashdot become a site for fanfics?

Probably about the same time that people stopped RTFA : It's not a fanfic, but an introduction to a very meager article (which, in turn, gets the conversation rolling on people's thoughts/experiences on scary moments ingame.)

But hey, you're here to bitch: I am not going to spoil that by simply telling you could also skip articles like this next time... It's not as if you are paying for it...

Bit more on topic : One of the scariest moments I had myself was with the game "Blood" (a zombie themed first person shooter), where kamikaze zombies would run at you (SeriousSam-like) while releasing a piercing scream on the top of their lungs.
Those screams... those screams !!!

Needless to say, they still haunt me ;)
I installed this game the other day, and it seems very tame nowadays compared to the voicework used in other games : I still have some good memories of playing that game with the occasional goosebumps though.

Re:Don't worry.

[PresidentEnder]

Have you ever played Chrono Trigger? The "loose end" that you mention is tied up quite nicely in one of the dialogs. Lavos is just one of its race, a race that keeps humans (and the inhabitants of other planets) like humans keep cattle, only we're intelligent and cows just taste good.

Re:FFVII wasn't scary.

[MayonakaHa]

Back to Thief: Deadly Shadows.

Mod this down if this gives away too much

[spoiler]

Scary is when you get to the level in the game you're usualy wisecracking, confident character gets a tinge of terror in his voice. It's also when you spend the entire first half of the level creeping around, scared out of your wits because you KNOW there's something there to get you.. so you hide in the shadows like the thief you are.. atmosphere so thick it's dripping down the walls. You finally figure out that there's nothing there.. nothing around the corner.. nothing behind the next door. That's when you realized that you have to go through the rusted prisonlike gate and to do that.. you have to turn the lights on.. and when you get through the door.. that's where the real monsters are..

Seriously though.. the Cradle in Thief: Deadly Shadows is one of the scariest places I've been in my gaming life. The guy who designed it spent most of the project developing it in his spare time, making sure every little detail was perfectly honed to scare the living crap out of you. I heard he some day wants to make an entire game like that one level.. FSM help us. Very interesting stuff he did with it too, putting little details in writing here and there, and objects around that just give you the creeps. Nothing really blatantly "scary" like blood splashes on the walls and other ridiculous stuff like that. The fact alone that you find out it wasn't an insane asylum then an orphanage, but both at the same time which got set on fire gives you the heebie jeebies.