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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."
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.
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.
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
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.