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

FFVII wasn't scary.

[Meagermanx]

You want to talk scary games? Play Thief: The Dark Project. That is the scariest game I have ever played, bar none.
Go ahead. Start playing level two. You'll beg to stop playing, but won't be able to take your hand off the mouse.

Re:FFVII wasn't scary.

[oGMo]

Pfft, go turn off the lights and play Silent Hill (2 or 3) in the dark by yourself. Or Fatal Frame 1-2. People these days think stuff jumping out at you in the dark or sneaking up behind is "scary". That's not scary. Scary is when you don't want to continue the game because of what might be behind the next door. Scary is when you get up from playing and are afraid to open the door to your room, lest you find it a twisted hellworld version of what it should be.

Re:FFVII wasn't scary.

[Soul-Burn666]

Like you said, but needs to be stressed out more, what makes a game or a scene scary imho, is that you generally have self confidence and feel unbeatable, and then you get to something which seriously make you feel like you don't belong there and helpless.

Why was Doom1/2 scary? You were genrally strong and went through well lit areas and then blam, a door opens and some unearthly monster comes out. Or when you go through an area which looks ok, open a door and see some hellish room.
Doom3 was hardly scary because it was ALWAYS dark. You were always careful and expecting the next monster. And oh, the "roam" sound effects in D1/2 were FAR more creepy than in D3. A small point tho, that the only really scary part in D3 is with the Cherubs. They make this creepy sound when they are far away and then come at you. Moreover, they look like cute but creepy babies with wings. A "monster" isn't scary, because you are desensitized to it, but something partly human - horrible.

Another scary game I played was AlienVSPredator2. As a marine, the first encounter with an alien is about 15mins into the game, after walking around the planet between two bases. You have a motion detector which beeps when something other than yourself moves. But also includes doors. In these 15mins, you open enough doors to think less of the beeps until one time two aliens just fall on you from the top vents. I literally spent a minute firing my assault rifle on the alien's dead body (cuz it kinda kept moving lol).
Then later on, you also walk through well lit areas, and then get attacked unexpectedly.

Another very scary event is when you do something you think is right, and then realize your mistake too late. I was playing JediKnight (the original lol), and in that game it's possible to dismember stormtroopers with your lightsaber. So i'm walking through some barely lit ancient shrine, walk mindlessly deep into some room... Then I look on the floor and see dismembered stormtroopers, I think "ah, i've been here before"... Then I realize "oh fuck I wasn't here before..................", I look back and see some big monster just behind me.

But undoubtly, the scariest moment in my gaming life is The Shalebridge Cradle. I went through that iron door and into the reception booth. Suddenly the light begin to flicker. OK........... And then you see THAT. I went to the game menu -> Quit. The whole game to that point took me about 2 days of gameplay. This part took 3 because I couldn't get myself to play it. That nonwithstanding, after I nearly finished the part, I went around unimmersed, just to find all the treasures. And indeed it was far from scary, it was just pixels, which is the most important point.
The game MUST immerse you for it to be scary.

Re:FFVII wasn't scary.

[fbjon]

And those inmates, with the spasmic movements, and the frickin' cages over their mouths! Aaargh!

Truly an experience that rivals System Shock 2. I might just find some code to jump over that level next time I play Thief III.

Don't worry.

[HunterZ]

If it's any consolation, it was posted in the Games category where the /. gods have decided that 95% of stories are not worthy of beeing seen -- except by the dozen or so of us who bothered to look at what categories were available and checked the Games box. We should totally start a "/. Games category readers' club" or something.

Anyways, back on topic: I don't think that writer has played enough video games. My roommate has a morbid fascination with scary games and she could probably list off several that are way scarier than FF7 -- a game that I've tried seriously to play at least three or four times over the years but keep putting down because of all the silliness that kills the dark mood (mini-game carnivals, beach resorts, whorehouse humor, etc.).

On the topic of Japanese RPGs: It'd be great if some western-world company were to do remakes of JRPGs in a way that appeals better to non-asians. This is how we got Robotech; I guess it's also how we got Lunar, which I still didn't care much for (mostly because the plot was still too cliche). The development of Japanese RPGs was derailed at some point, and now they've all got the same recycled plots but with some new battle system gimmick. The sad part is that gamers eat it up and talk about how great each new JRPG is instead of calling the game companies out on the carpet for it. Chrono Trigger came frustratingly close to being a good game, but they screwed it up by not tying up loose ends in the plot (like what the hell is Lavos other than some spikey thing that wants to eat the world?). Final Fantsy 7 was close, but had too much cheesiness and more mini-games than regular combat encounters (it's almost like the designers had ADD and couldn't stand the idea of a consistently dark, deep plot).

Re:Don't worry.

[Grym]

Wait? No one liked Chrono Cross? I very vividly remember that game, and how much I enjoyed it. The story was interesting, the graphics were amazing for the PSX, and it had just enough references to Chrono Trigger to make those who played the first game feel at home. I can't recall anyone who played Chrono Cross who didn't find it to be an excellent game. Hell, I bought a Playstation to play the game, and I didn't feel disappointed.

I hate Chrono Cross.

Being a good RPG gamer, I decided against using any sort of guide the first way through. About a third of the way into the game I got stuck on an almost impossible boss battle (I've been told it's the hardest encounter in the game.) I tried everything I could in my gamer experience to win this battle. NOTHING worked. No amount of item-spamming cheese or character combination could work. I probably spent about 6 hours of actual playtime trying to win just this one fight.

Fair enough... I'll just level my characters up and come back stronger for the fight, right? WRONG! Chrono Cross has an extremly STUPID leveling system in which the power of your character is limited by the progression of the game's storyline (ie. Boss fights).

Normally even this wouldn't upset me. Maybe there's something I'm doing wrong in the fight. Maybe I just suck, right? Thinking this was the case, I hopped online at the time to get some help. Well, as it turns out. I wasn't alone. This problem happened to a number of customers... The reason? All of us had picked a JOKE CHARACTER THAT EXCLUDES ONE FROM PICKING THE BEST CHARACTER IN THE GAME. And it's not like this was hard to do. It was possible by following the normal progression of the story. All I can say is: ASDFJAEORDSAOFJASKLDFNKLJASHNDLKFJASDLKFJASDFLKJAS DFJ:KLASDJFLI:QJWSDVKLN!

Needless to say, I've never touched that damn game since finding that out. What kind of QA process lets a dead-end like that slip into production? Each of the moronic elements that culimnates into this giant clusterfuck-of-a-timesink is damn near heresy in traditional RPG game design. Bah...

-Grym

Re:System Shock I & II

[Dachannien]

System Shock 2 really was a great game because of the atmosphere (so were Thief I and II, for that matter). The level designers did a superb job at doing what TFA mentioned above - using the level design to indicate that "you should probably go in there next," while at the same time giving you the feeling of "like hell I'm going in there!!"

I've read that the biggest reason there are no friendly characters to interact with was due to technical limitations, and the use of recorded logs throughout the game was their workaround, but honestly, it's comes off as a stroke of thematic genius. A great deal of the atmosphere of SS2 was that all these horrible things had happened on board the Von Braun and the Rickenbacker, and those horrible things could happen to you as well as you open that door or round the next corner. But we're so used to seeing visual cues in horror movies and other games that using audio cues instead - horrifying, visceral sounds of people meeting their demise, dashing any hopes you had that you'd be able to catch up with them - proves to be superbly effective.

I'm really looking forward to Bioshock, because I trust the team at Irrational to be able to re-evoke the same emotional response that they did with System Shock 2.