Games and Fear

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.

Comments

Remember the Alien TC for Doom?

[El_Smack]

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.

my scariest video game moment

[JeanBaptiste]

looked something like this

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


Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 3.6).

Re:my scariest video game moment

[ConceptJunkie]

Pshaw! Now this is scary: ....... ...D... ..@D... ..DD... .......

Now I have to add a whole bunch of text to get around the lameness filter. Of course, if it were truly a lameness filter it would, in fact, filter itself.

Thief: The Dark Project

[Chuckaluphagus]

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.

id Software

[sYn pHrEAk]

It's not iD Software it's id Software and it has always been pronounced just like the word it comes from:

id -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.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines

[balthan]

The Ocean House Hotel was one of the creepiest areas I've ever played in a game.

Re:Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines

[JimmehAH]

There's so much attention to detail and care put in to that level. It's excellent.
The whole game is.
Terrible shame about what happened to Troika, really.

Original Half-Life

[Thornae]

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.

F.E.A.R. and Doom I

[jgoemat]

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. Instead of the groan from the guys that threw fire, if the alien that replaced them was near you would hear a couple different sounds. One that would repeat every so often was the motion sensor sound from the Aliens movie. I was running around one of those maze levels in the dark and I couldn't find the guy. I wondered if he didn't get stuck in a wall or was in a hidden room. All of a sudden I decided to turn around and there he was screaming like an alien and attacking me.

One of the best horror games ever: Anchorhead

[ChaosDiscord]

It's "just" a text adventure, but it's reach, convincing, creepy, and free. I highl recommend Michael Gentry's Anchorhead . 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 on Windows or Linux and Spatterlight on Mac OS X.