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Videogames Make Better Horror Than Movies?
Wired author Clive Thompson has up an article stating that, with today's jaded audiences, videogames are more effective horror-conveyances than movies. Thompson argues that the removal of the fourth wall, placing the player directly into the story, overcomes the obstacles movie-makers face when telling a scary story. "I'll start down a corridor, hear something freaky up ahead, then freeze in panic. Maybe if I stay quiet the monster will go away? S^!t, maybe it's already headed this way, and I should move! But if I move the monster will hear me ... so maybe I should stay quiet ... gaaaaah! Games already seem like dream states. You're wandering around a strange new world, where you simultaneously are and aren't yourself. This is already an inherently uncanny experience. That's why a well-made horror game feels so claustrophobically like being locked inside a really bad -- by which I mean a really good -- nightmare." Do you agree? Is your favorite scary tale a movie ... or a game? (Silent Hill, I'm looking at you.)
The thought of playing a video game in no way fills me with the same sense of horror as the thought of watching a Uwe Boll movie based on the game.
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I've never been scared by a movie, ever. But I almost soiled myself the first time I played Resident Evil (the part where the dogs jump through the window in particular).
I don't agree. While you're playing the game, you have some sort of an adrenaline rush, that effectively makes you immune to any kind of scare the developers might devise. That, and the inherent stupidity of the monsters you'll encounter surely makes them less of a threat.
But, on the bright side, it's easier to make a specific mood in a game, and make the player be afraid of that, for example - I was absolutely scared of playing Ultima Underworld alone when I was about ten or eleven. There was something in those dark corridors, bones lying around, and the music that provided the tension needed to scare the hell out of me. And it works today, too. Not in the way Doom3 would like us to have, but, for example, BioShock manages to capture the freaky atmosphere perfectly, making you look around your shoulder far more often.
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
I love horror movies, almost 3/4 of my DVD collection of the horror genre. But they don't really make me scared, it's hard for you to relate to the situation. Games on the other hand put you in the world. I remember when I was playing Condemned and my wife was like how could a video game be scary?. She also didn't understand "how I knew where I was going". Which showed me she didn't understand how emersed one can be in a game.
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
You know a demon's going to teleport into the closet when you do! Video games just provide a better environment for horror. Yes, the whole forth wall thing, but also the environment you play in. You often play them alone, in a dark room. You choose how long the suspense lasts before you pickup that gun. In the end, however, you do pickup the gun... and when nothing happens; it gets worse because the environment didn't react the way you expected. Until you turn around of course.
Demented But Determined.
The screeches of the monkeys in System Shock 2 always freak me out, no matter how many times I play it. (playing BioShock right now and it's nowhere near as scary as SS2 IMHO)
Or the sounds Haunts make in the Thief series.. eek.
Trolling is a art,
I never get scared by a movie but when playing F.E.A.R, Doom 3 or even better a mod for doom 3 that makes it play like a Rouge game (Dungeon Doom) I can only play for about 1-2 hours before I just need to pause or stop playing and go do something else, I think its due to the fact you fell so engrossed into what you are going to do you start to over think your decisions and it begins to slowly creep into your mind about whats around the next corner, and how it can be your last move. In movies your just sitting there and watching and you can't do a single thing, so why would someone feel engrossed about some stupid character who just ran up the stairs instead of running out the front door?
http://penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/09/29
I heard good things about Alien Doom so when I finally downloaded it I turned off the lights to get the most from the experience.
For the first 20 minutes or so you are creeping through corridors, always wondering what might appear around the next corner. Nothing much actually happens except that the corridors gradually become more and more covered in alien slime. You go through several levels without actually seeing any enemies, even though you know you must be getting closer to their lair.
All of a sudden an alien jumps at you out of nowhere.
I have never before and never since been more scared by a computer game.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
I used to be scared by movies as a kid... not by what I was seeing on the screen but just of the thought of all of these terrifying monsters coming after me in real life... When I grew up that stopped working on me. On the other hand when I started playing Doom 3 I could only play for short burts at a time because the sense of terror was so tangible. I've played a few other games like F.E.A.R. that can induce that effect as well but no movie recently has caused me to sit and remind myself "It's only a movie. It isn't real." In a game like Doom 3 you don't have time to tell yourself that when a Pinkie wants to eat you and you only have pistol ammo left and it causes for some tense moments.
The interactivity of a game makes for a scarier and more intense experience than any film can provide, now that graphics are becoming more and more realistic. In a game, the player feels like he's actually a part of the story, rather than merely a spectator.
If you had asked me in my pre-cynical days, I would have said movies by a long shot. Now I would say videogames.
When I was a young neurotic who believed the universe was conspiring to kill me, many films were filled with horror. This was before I was cynical enough to pull apart the special effects, camera shots, and acting. Movies like Alien caused much distress. Jaws had me looking behind my couch for a shark for days. Disaster films like Earthquake, Towering Inferno, and Poseidon Adventure made me scared to pretty much go anywhere or do anything. And caused many nightmares. Most of these films do nothing for me now. Alien still stands up, but I laugh at most of the things I was scared of.
These days, the only true scares come from videogames. They are immersive, which helps, but mainly movies are public affairs during more normal hours. My videogames get played mostly late night when I am alone, which really gives them an edge over a movie with a hundred people surrounding me.
I'd say that either Ravenholm in Half-Life2 was pretty scary or the one mission in Thief 3 where you go into the haunted asylum.
The original Half Life was a really classic example of this. You could make a decent monster movie along the same plot, but you wouldn't have quite the tension.
EG, the tension where you are creeping through the silo with the giant tentacles, the first time you meet the big shark-thingy, the elation and then horror as the marines come, etc....
A movie wouldn't be nearly as immersive.
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I have never been too scared in movies. Short of a few times as a kid where I had to ride my bike through the woods to get back home I have never felt "horror". When I first played the original Resident Evil on the PS i had broken my hip in a Motocorss accident 2 weeks before so was bed ridden. I lived in a big house along and my mobility was extremely limmited. I remember laying in my bed in the night with only the light from the tv playing one of the first parts of the game. When I went down that first corridor and found the first team member you encounter and the game showed me the first cut scene of the zombie finishing his meal and turning toward me, I was startled. As soon as controll was given back to me and the zombie started heading to me... I was completely FREAKED OUT! I mean I felt real fear. There is no way a movie will ever reach that level of immersion when it comes to fear.
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While it didn't have the whole game, there's a level in it - The Cradle - that's absolutely, completely spooky. Running around a burned-out building that used to be both an insane asylum AND an orphanage...
Why exactly would a game be inherently better than a movie for the horror genre? Hell, a novel could be just as effective as either one of those mediums.
It comes down to good writing. The reason most horror movies aren't particularly effective is because the writing is such garbage. If these writes were to produce scripts for games those games would be equally ineffective at being scary.
If anything, I'd argue that it's easier to make a good horror movie than it is to produce a scary game. It's very easy to manage pacing in a movie. The entire thing is nicely packaged and the director has complete control over the movie. With a game, in addition to the underlying plot a creator has to be concerned with how the gamer interacts with the game. How to convey the proper atmosphere and provide appropriate challenges without making the game tedious.
Ultimately, this is the problem I've found with nearly all horror games, including the Resident Evil series. The game hits a point where they're wandering back and forth trying to find something, or are given these odd tasks for the sake of providing some level of gameplay ultimately reminding me that I'm just playing a game. With a movie or a novel, I know it's fake, but I don't have to worry about some gameplay mechanic disrupting the experience and thus it's easier for me to become engrossed in the story.
For me the experience of watching a movie is usually so far removed from that of playing a game that I can't directly compare them. While a movie can use a particular character or characters as surrogates for the audience, youre essentially watching things happen to other people. You can be sympathetically scared for them, but you don't really feel scared for yourself.
When you're playing a game, that avatar on the screen is, for all intents and purposes, you. You're not just watching some movie star go down the stairs to their doom, you have to choose to go down those stairs yourself. The experience of that sort of scare is very different, and to me much more personal, than the one-sided character/spectator relationship in films and such.
The only experience that for me sort of blurs that line between those two types of scares is listening to an audio play, such as radio drama or Big Finish Productions' audio CDs. When I'm listening to one of those I usually have my eyes closed and my imagination turned up high, and thus tend to see things from more of a first-person perspective in my mind's eye. A good horror story on audio can therefore approach the levels of immersion that a good video game provides, without being interactive.
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I can count the number of times a movie made me jump out of my seat on one hand (notably, three of them came from "The Forgotten"), but Half Life's head crabs still give me chills. They weren't even that threatening, really, but somehow they always scare me. Even when I was sure the developers had put a head crab in the dark hallway just around the corner, and even after a few replays, they still managed to make me jump.
Half Life 2's head crabs never struck me the same way, but seeing the fast zombie leaping at me in Ravenholm for the first time sure did it.
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First time you run into one of those... they got me good. I jumped and sprayed bullets everywhere.
I love horror movies, very few have actually scared me. FEAR creeped me out.. Call Of Cthulu Dark Side of the Earth, that creeps me out havent finished it yet. System Shock 2 gave me some good jumps (back in the day) Clive Barkers undying had me going good. The original Alone in the Dark... yea that was creepy.
Video games are full of titles that I got scared from, horror movies not so much. But damn, I love well done special effects, so I keep watching horror.
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
One of the things that make survival horror games so attracting is that you can die in many horrendous ways. I still remember Harry Mason of SH1 getting caught and eaten by that tentacle thing in the kitchen. Or how Heather's body was dragged by Vatiel after being killed.
Another thing is the first-person perspective, and the fear you experience from having "lived" similar situations in the past. You hear some dogs howling, you can't see barely anything, while your radio keeps playing that static louder and louder.
You just can't make these things happen in a movie. You don't know how the character is going to get killed, because you can't replay. You don't face the consequences of making a decision (left or right?), and are only limited to being a mere witness of the events. In a movie you can't feel the fear of getting killed after realizing you're out of healing items.
Videogames are simply the best of the "worst" that has happened in the horror genre.
To summarize, I'd like to quote the motto for the Silent Hill 3 propaganda: "Everything you never wanted to see."
You do the tutorial, then you're in the ship and most everyone else dies, and you're wandering totally alone in a freaky environment armed only with a wrench, until all the sudden you start hearing these freaky screeching noises and your health goes down.
You have to look down at the ground to even notice the fucking radioactive monkey clawing away at you.
I had dreams about Bioshock the night after playing, not scary precisely, but full of a sense of dread and loss. Dreams aren't entirely unusual (I dreamed about yellow dragons after playing lots of Adventure as a kid). Still, it's rare enough that it means I was brought into the world of Bioshock more fully than others in recent memory.
The unique aspect of Bioshock is that the fear of death has been removed. Respawning is fairly painless and I'm armed with a variety of tricks against even the toughest enemies. What's left is a sense of horror at what humanity is capable of, of hubris and atrocities committed for a supposedly just cause. That's a deeper dread, perhaps, than demons leaping out of closets, but just as effective.
(ok who was the idiot who modded it funny?)
I've also played the Alien Doom mod, and i loved it. Altho i also felt the same fear by playing the Aliens game in the C64, stage 2. You know you had to go through an alien area, that aliens come out of everywhere and you can't run away. And still, you have to go there.
I jumped about six feet in the air when those dogs jumped through the window. Was NOT expecting that.
Doom 3 also had me screaming loud enough to wake up my flatmate at 3am when a bunch of crap on a table levitated and flew at me through the window (in the game)...
First game that ever scared me was the Wheel of Time game. Second level, inside the "deserted" city of Shadar Logoth at night (which, if you're familiar with the books, you know is a bad place to be). Everywhere you go, there's the sound of gravel crumbling, as if something just ducked out of sight. Whispering noises fill the air, and every now and again there's a faint cry, as if something horrible were in pain. You drop into a darker area, and a voice whispers "Staaaaaaaay" right in your ear, and THEN you see the tendril of fog reaching out to you from a crack in the ground. I actually yelped out loud.
Second game that ever scared me was the FEAR demo. The glimpses of the little girl were already freaking me out, and then at one point I backtracked a bit, climbed a ladder, and she was STANDING RIGHT THERE!
I actually said "yeeeAGGG" and jumped off the ladder.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
...was playing Fatal Frame in the pitch black of night. No movie has ever terrified me more than the tension that builds up with the ambient soundtrack and the tiny light that tells you something is near, to activate the camera and go into 1st person mode, creeping along to find the ghostly image before it jumps out at you.
Anyone who's played it will no doubt remember the chilling moment while you tiptoe down the Rope Hallway and the red light comes on, looking up and coming face to face with Vengeance.
UNDYING.... seriously one of the scariest experiences I have ever had. Playing alone and in the dark I would find myself thinking "I have GOT to get out of this freaking house..." Only to later realize I simply had to turn off the game. Movies can scare but never on the same level as Undying. I was stressed out almost from start to finish.
Silent hill sums it up perfectly, the movie wasn't too far removed from the games, but the movie isn't scary compared to the games and it's for 1 simple reason. Movies will continue no matter what, you can walk away and shrug and they will still play. Where as in a game you take control and must continue the fear to continue the plot.
Silent Hill games make you feel like at any moment you could be jumped by some insanely powerful monster and then it toys with you with the radio, a little noise here, a little growl there, is it just random noise or is a complete freak out monster about to maim you? who knows? These things get to us, we have no idea -how- to rationally deal with these things because they are beyond all logic, movies we can go "CGI" "Make up" "hero must survive" and then we play silent hill and suddenly it's "oh fuck, what the hell is going on?"
One thing I would note is the cultural differences, Japanese horror tends to work on tension and supernatural things. Ghosts, bumps in the night, general feeling of unease. Where as Western horror tends to be more gore and shock, the gore and shock has long ago lost it's shock value to us adults, where as the feeling of tension is very hard to break no matter what.
Compare Resident evil (Western horror style) with Silent Hill (Japanese horror style) and you'll see one is scary for a while, where as the other continues to be scary even if you're in a safe room with nothing creepy ever.
And just because it needs mentioning. The mannequin beheading event in Silent hill 3 is the scariest moment I've ever had in a game, just insanely creepy even though it presented no danger to me, it felt like I HAD to leave that room or something would behead me next.
I like muppets.
Sure, it didn't involve a dark hallway in a haunted mansion with Zombies around every corner, but the scariest game I ever played was Everquest. Because of the large penalty for dying that possibly involved both a long corpse run and a significant experience point reduction, one truly feared death (at least in the first year or two). When you were deep inside a dungeon, or exploring a new location for the first time, the sense of trepidation and consternation was palpable.
Even though I no longer play EQ, when I think back to those days, I have much more vivid memories of the close encounters and adrenaline induced situations in EQ than I do from any other MMORPG I've played since, including WoW, Vanguard, etc. I attribute that in no small way to the real and legitimate death penalty in the game.
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I played Doom 3 with a good surround-sound setup and a group of people watching. People's reactions were stupendous, and it just fed my adrenaline. The key is to play it on a hard setting - the idea is to be afraid, and be cautious - not to be Rambo. There is tension when you have to count your ammo and walk slowly to avoid being surprised.
It also helps to be very comfortable with the controls. I've played FPS's long enough that the controls are extension to my brain. I think forward and my character moves forward. If you look down at the keyboard and have to think about it then it becomes more like watching a play from a distance -- you see the stage, the guy on the light board, etc. You can't get as emotionally involved.
I remember two particular events in the early levels of Doom 3:
1) I approached a staircase in a dark room. You approach the stairs and you hear metal screeching and you barely perceive movement. Then a demon leaps out. It was brilliant: First you hear "something" but are unsure what, then you're eyes perceive movement so you strain to look closer, then something large and frightening appears. It was very "cinematic"
2) Personal involvement can make the game more interesting in ways that would not work in a movie. Example: I returned to a room I was already in and said aloud "okay, I've already been through here and there's no other way in so I'm safe" and I started to run for it. Suddenly, a body falls from the ceiling right in front of me and I look up just in time to see a demon come down and nearly land on me. The adrenaline hits and I managed to duck a fireball and fire a shotgun blast at pointblank range. After that, everyone looked at me and said "nice job" -- That could not have been played out in a movie. If the character said something that obvious everyone would KNOW something is about to happen. And if the character did something superb in response it would be unbelievable. But when it wa the person right there playing the game it went from cheesy and unbelievable to a combination of fully and cool.
I know Doom 3 was not popular since it just re-hashed old concepts, but it was moments like these that made it one of the most fun games I've ever played.
I'd have to vote for the moment when the green alien dude (whom you've mistaken for a fellow astronaut in need of rescue from a forbidding otherworldly fractal-scape) pops up in front of your damn windshield and starts banging his way into your spaceship in Rescue on Fractalus, one of the first games ever to come out of Lucasarts. I used to play that on an Atari 800XT and it used to scare the hell out of me.
But there's a difference between that (relatively) easy videogame shock and the sense of deep disquiet that a really good horror movie can instill in you. It's true that the average scary game may make you jump more often than the average scary movie -- which rarely seems interested in the kind of classic horror-movie atmospherics that inform current game design -- but that's because the average scary movie really, really sucks. They're targeted at an audience of high-schoolers and/or gorehounds. Rob Zombie's movies may be *meaner* than anything this side of Manhunt, but they're certainly not scarier.
But the best scary movies are about something bigger than jolts. It may be hard, after several decades' fetishization of H.R. Giger's designs for the original Alien, to understand just how deeply creepy those insectoid, vaguely sexual, shapes up on screen were. It's easy to forget, watching the original Halloween at home on a letterboxed Anchor Bay DVD, what that movie looked and felt like, back in the day, when it was playing up on the big Panavision-sized screen in the kind of cavernous movie house that doesn't exist anymore.
There are some contemporary examples as well. Before their visual tropes became the stuff of cliché, Japanese horror movies like Ringu and Kairo brought the scary pretty effectively. 28 Weeks Later spun anxiety about avian flu and the Iraq war into a haunting zombie yarn about the dissolution of the family unit and wartime theatrics. The Descent had some real white-knuckle moments involving strangely deformed creatures in the near-total darkness. I love Bioshock and the immersive experience it provides in all its Dolby Digital 5.1 glory but the seams show -- the lines of dialogue spoken by the splicers are repeated too often, the gamepad mechanics are a little too abstract, the high-polygon creatures and texture-mapped environments just a little too uncanny-valley. Shocks-per-minute rate aside, the movies provide by far the more enveloping -- and aesthetically compelling -- psychological experience.
Surprised nobody mentioned Deus Ex yet. That's a VERY immersive game and one I would recommend people try even though it's got to be about 5 or 6 years old by now. They got a lot of things right in that game. You can download the 1st mission demo freely online.
The 1st mission isn't so scary, but... I can think of several times that I just got totally freaked out. Icarus talking to you through the infolink, MiB's bursting through the apartment door, pretty much all of Area 51...
You have to compare the best of each in order to make a somewhat balanced comparison. Comparing the best horror video game isn't very fair if you use your average horror film. That said the scariest (IMO) films have been the psychological. The ones where the scare factor isn't just a creepy thing jump at the right moment with a loud noise to emphasize it. The ones where you're thinking about how scary that was the rest of the night (or longer).
/.ers) noone has accomplished this yet.
The examples I can think of are The Ring, Blair Witch Project, (I'm told The Exorcist belongs here but haven't seen it.)
Now video games on the other hand have been the "creepy thing jumps at you" type for the most part. Off the top of my head I haven't played any games where the psychological impact was what freaked me out. Once a video game truly taps into this it could be insanely scary. However, to my limited knowledge (hint hint
... I was playing Bioshock. I had just killed my first big daddy. I was badly injured, I had almost no ammo left. I looked for a vending machine to buy some ammo and health when a SECOND big daddy comes around. I hid under the stairs in the game and hoped he wouldn't see me because I was so low on everything. I saved and went to bed.
Let me breathe a bit after that first encounter. That was brutal.
Depends what you want from your horror. The author seems to want a roller coaster ride, which games excel at giving you... Video games are certainly much more immersive and are better at creating an atmosphere. Whether they're first or third person whatever happens on that screen feels like it's happening to you.
But if you want to talk about horror from a storytelling standpoint... The best horror games are still cartoonish, sophmoric and one-dimensional compared to the best horror movies (and books for that matter.) For whatever reason the quality of writing just hasn't evolved yet. I'm not saying it can't be done, though I am beginning to suspect that there are some pretty big roadblocks. For example the character you inhabit has to be in many ways a blank slate, so it's a strange hybrid of your mind and decision making powers and someone else's background-- great for immersion, not so great for character development.
A movie will not scare me at all. Most horror movies that get pawned off as horror use simple parlor tricks like flashing lights, loud sounds, loud music and fast movement to give the audience a thrill. There is no real horror in a movie anymore. There is no sense of impending doom that keeps you on your toes and the hair on the back of your neck standing up. Even with surround sound and a complete multi-channel soundtrack, the movies just don't do it anymore. The mystique is gone.
Now a video game, think about it. They have the same surrounding, multi-channel soundtrack and you are usually sitting within inches of a screen that will fill your entire field of vision and unlike the movies, you have to make decisions that directly impact the outcome of the game. In a movie theater, you are sitting on your butt stuffing your face with popcorn and candy in a cushy chair, usually with a person next to you and thinking about how much you have to pee because you polished off that $16 64 oz soda. The video game, you are usually not eating anything because it requires both hands and you need to concentrate because you are looking for clues to attain your next goal in the game. In a movie all you have to focus on is what alien or monster or whatever is gonna jump out next. If you are concentrating of accomplishing a task in a game, a monster jumping out and trying to cause you harm is unnerving. Add to that the music and sound effects and the fact that your monitor is filling your entire field of vision and you get buried in the game and you become part of it.
It amounts to sensory overload and your brain gets into fight or flight mode when it's trying to process all that information. Consequently when a flaming skull comes flying at you out of the fog, you bug out because it's just doubled the amount of sensory input you received and your brain is in self-preservation mode. your adrenalin spikes, your heart rate goes up and if you are like me, you yell profanities at the game and start pushing mouse and keyboard buttons harder than you need to. I don't ever recall getting those sensations in a movie theater. There is just too much information not related to the topic of the movie to distract you. A video game gives you the ability minimize those distractions by shrinking the environment in which you are interacting with the video game. It's hard to be scared in a movie theater full of silly, screaming teenage girls jumping and holding on to equally silly, laughing teenage boys. Now, in your home, in a dark room with nothing but your and your glowing box of a monitor, yeah, that'll spook you out.
You left out Condemned
As in anything that depends on taste, I'd actually expect quite a bit of variation. There is no "better" or "worse" as such, there's only "better" or "worse" for a given taste or personality type. At best, you can say more people like X than Y.
E.g., if I'm allowed to give a counter-anecdote to your anecdote, I'm the exact opposite.
Resident Evil never did much for me. The only "horror" in it for me were the awkward rotational controls and artificial view limitations because of the fixed camera. There was an additional (and for my taste unnecessary) extra learning curve and extra difficulty caused just by dealing with the weird control scheme. The decision to have limited saves was yet another thing that just said "artificial". Worse yet, it tripped my suspension of disbelief, because I had that artificial stuff in my face all the time and had to think about it instead of getting immersed in the world. Having to wrestle the controls doesn't make me go "OMG, I'm so scared", it makes me go "oh, FFS..."
I'm sure someone will mod that "troll" because it badmouths his favourite game, but it's not. I'm _not_ saying "Resident Evil is bad", I'm just saying that different people have wildly different tastes. The same game can be "bad" for some, but "bestest game evar" for some others.
And so it is with games vs movies too. I don't get scared by most movies, but a couple did manage to trip a particular phobia of mine big time. Still, I find well-done horror movies entertaining in their own non-scary way. I can't remember any game that triggered a similar response to either, so (while most were otherwise entertaining as a game) I wouldn't count any game I've played so far as truly a replacement to horror movies. More like something different, that can coexist. Again, I expect that for different people your mileage might vary. A lot.
Also as a handicap in proclaiming games as the total replacement there, is the factor that _most_ video game designers can't write a good story or choreograph it well if their life depended on it. A couple of them can, no doubt, but, honestly, most video game plots and stories don't hold a candle to a good movie. At least half are barely more than a vague background story as to why are you killing those monsters there, and you just give it a nod as you happily shoot zombies or whatnot in the head.
And at least half the rest are made by people who don't really understand whatever genre they're making, they don't even like it, but they figured they'd make a clone of whatever sold last year. And it shows. There is no mathematical formula or algorithm to make a fun game or a scary game, just some vague hypotheses and a lot of taking guesses and using your own gut feeling. Someone who doesn't really fall in the same market segment, just won't have the same "gut feeling" as to what should be fun. As I was saying, different people like different things. If you're different from your target market, well, you won't like the same things they like.
Now admittedly, (A) there have been exceptions, and (B) the situation _is_ (very) slowly improving, and (C) Hollywood makes plenty of duds too. Still, on the whole, I'd say it'll be a few more years before games are really a reliable replacement for any movie genre. Don't get me wrong, they're fun in their own right, as _games_, but I see that really as more of a different kind of entertainment at the moment, rather than something set to replace movies altogether.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I vote a soundly YES! When I played Eternal Darkness I was so much more scared at sounds, images and inexpected events than I were with any movie.
The Universe is shrinking all around my head.
No video game has topped the flexing door scene from the original Haunting. They're not going to match the incredibly bleak ending of the (again, original) Night Of the Living Dead. None could, unless video games suddenly get psychological depth. And they can't have psychological depth, because hitting things (or opening doors, or running down corridors) is a really, really small part of what we do every day. Good horror plays on multiple levels, only a few of which are accessible to the video game maker.
I remember jumping out of my skin, playing Doom II (for Christ's sake!), the first time I heard the Cyber-demon bellow. On the other hand, it never made me lie awake at night, wondering what will happen to me when I'm dead. Admittedly, no Resident Evil movie's going to send me into an existential crisis either, unless I get so bored I slit my wrists halfway through.
Video games rely on horror levels 1&2- Bears and Lightning. Bad horror movies stay on that level, too, because even rubber monsters are easier to fake than tension. Good horror movies have the full range- Bears and Lightning are joined by scary things like Shame, Shit, Disease, Getting Old, Falling in Love, Going Crazy, Telling Lies, Betrayal, Weird People, and Does God Exist? among others. These themes are very hard to depict well, and frighteningly, in a video game. Can you imagine playing The Stone Tape video game?
Even films that are full of Big Loud Horribles, like the (again, original) Texas Chainsaw Massacre, can have every kind of fear baked into them. Video game makers have never even approached the terrifying complexity of the real world.
http://d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y.com/
Aaron just got owned by a grue.
hands-down winner of the 'messing-with-your-head' game.
The adrenalin jolt at the very beginning where the cut-scene with the room full of zombies stops being a cut-scene, but there's nothing to tell you this. The warping graphics the more insane you became, which actually made it difficult to navigate, and just gave you a feeling that everything was wrong because perspective had shifted. The first time I saw the big fly walking around on the screen, and when I went to the TV to brush it off, it was on the *inside*...
Pissed all over the Resident Evil series from a great height in all respects, but didn't get the marketing. I don't like the REvil games much, not because they're scary, but because they're difficult for some silly reasons. Static save points, little or no ammo, guns so feeble they're practically useless, inabilty to improvise weapons and endless schlepping around on pointless fetch-quests. Fuck the gun, give me a sharpened spade, and let's see how scary these zombies are with no heads.
...but a great original 1985-era scary game was Rescue on Fractalus (it used actual fractals to generate an alien landscape, hence the title). You'd rescue downed pilots, who would see you land, run under your ship disappearing from view and (pause) there'd be a taptaptap to let them in. The trick was sometimes, after the pilot had disappeared from view, the "pilot" was really an alien and it'd SUDDELNY JUMP UP ON YOUR WINDSHIELD COMPLETE WITH SCARY MUSIC AND IT'S BANGING TO GET IT KILLITKILLITKILLIT!!! Great times, I'd play it with a friend and we'd both about wet ourselves.
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one little section in Max Payne... That dreamish sequence where he walks into the dark on that vine-ish looking tightrope... Mayhaps it's jus' 'cause I'm a parent, but hearing that dead baby cry and call out while surrounded by darkness gave my goosebumps goosebumps.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
I'd have to vote for the moment when the green alien dude (whom you've mistaken for a fellow astronaut in need of rescue from a forbidding otherworldly fractal-scape) pops up in front of your damn windshield and starts banging his way into your spaceship
That reminds me of this other survival horror game in the 80's. Project Firestart. Has anyone here played it?
While The Ring and The Grudge had its moments, it was more shock and horror (the cat bay notwithstanding).
BUT, Silent Hill 3 was so creepy that I couldn't get myself to play past the first room... yes.. it freaked me out that much. There was a feeling of dread that I couldn't keep going.. yikes..
The only movie that scares me is 'The Exorcist', and you can note that's a 30-years old movie. In contrast, I find Silent Hill series and Resident Evil series very nice in terror effectiveness.
Minti: What's that huge shuriken in your back?! Kin: It's the instrument of my victory.
Look at you, Hacker. A pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?
Even with my crapp-assed Radeon X300SE, as long as the lights were off and the speakers cranked, that game nearly scared the shit out of me at times.
http://mods.moddb.com/155/they-hunger/downloads/
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Good horror movies have the full range- Bears and Lightning are joined by scary things like Shame, Shit, Disease, Getting Old, Falling in Love, Going Crazy, Telling Lies, Betrayal, Weird People, and Does God Exist? among others.
And who says videogames don't have that? In Silent Hill 1, due to bad decisions in the game, I had to kill Cybil (a cop in the game who helped you go through a lot of stuff) because she went zombie.
As I approached and she tried to give me a last shot, I had to give her the final blow. Later this followed a scene where Charles was depressed (or was it my imagination / distorted memory? Even better) because he had killed her. Congratulations! You're now a murderer.
In SH3, Heather has a dicussion with this guy in glasses, where he hints at the possibility that heather might not be killing monsters, but other human beings.
Videogames can force you to do evil things JUST FOR THE SAKE OF CONTINUING THE GAME. Personally, I don't like those kind of decisions in the games, but the point is that videogames can do everything movies do to mess with your head. If they don't, it's because of stupid corporate decisions and that old "but that doesn't sell" crap.
Best horror "movie" out right now is Bioshock. :)
I think there's three reasons:
1. A game is more immersive.
2. The game probably gets a lot more thought put into it than a horror movie.
3. The horror movie genre has become the "virtual snuff film" genre and caters to sick fucks.
Mod me flame bait for #3 if you must, but I completely stand by it.
They're releasing a "Art Of Bioshock" book. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for an "Art Of Hostel" or "Art Of Saw" book.
A 1992 computer game based around Giger's art, you play a guy who has bought a house that has connections to an alternate world... I never did finish it. It was really easy to lose and die, and the dying was pretty frightening! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Seed_(computer_g ame)
I'm also casting my vote for Eternal Darkness. Excellent game. It did an amazing job with wearing down your nerves in time to punch you in the gut with something that makes you wish you had put plastic on your couch. Of particular note is when you 'see' yourself in the bathtub having slashed your own wrists.
None of the Resident Evil games ever did it for me, though. Not sure why, but I never found them scary. Unless you count the voice acting from the first few.
Try Parasite Eve. It's also has its moments.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
The start of the Half-Life mod They Hunger is like that. Your car goes off the road and you spend quite a while walking through a large deserted graveyard. You think to yourself, "Man, I'd hate to have to fight my way out through all this." And then corpses start animating, and you realize... you actually do.
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Had some of the best atmosphere ever. Hearing the zombified worm-infested crewmates down the corridor as they look for you, the weird voices of the Many, etc. Want to get Bioshock on payday this week, must try! :D
In no particular order:
...
F.E.A.R. - As soon as you hit a paranormal flash, it's "oh crap, what's behind me"
Half-Life - Friggin head crabs!
Half-Life 2 - Ravenholm!
System Shock 2 - Highest "creepy" factor of any game I've ever played. Totally immersive for the technology of the time.
Doom 3 - Fear those dark places, because you know it's a trap.
As long as you got a descent computer to handle the game, which includes a solid speaker setup, video games can be 10x as immersive as a horror movie in the theater. That 1st person feel, and knowing you directly control the character in is like being inside the chaos. I've broken mice and knocked my keyboard off the desk from playing games too excitedly.
Watching movies rarely makes me yell out obsenities and jump in my seat. But maybe it's because I'm not black.
I haven't played Silent Hill, but Silent Hill 2 creeps me right the f@(% out. The sounds you hear in certain parts of the game that sound like footsteps near you, or other weird unnatural sounds are incredibly creepy - even if you KNOW there is nothing there. Playing on "Beginner" mode, where you can't actually die, is still scary from the atmosphere and not the threat of Game Over. The music in Silent Hill 2 (and I imagine the other games in the series, as the music is all done by Akira Yamaoka) can really put you on edge with the scrapey and creaky industrial noises.
There is one room in the apartments near the beginning of the game that has nothing in it, but the music that plays in there is enough to make me want to get out of there as quickly as possible.
The harmless "prisoner" monsters in the jail that you can't actually see (they are just noises coming from outside the camera's view) scared the bejesus out of me and I wasted a few rounds of ammo just to make the sounds go away. Another open area in the jail has noting in it monster-wise, but the intermittent sounds of what appears to be running steps or muffled horse gallops coming from somewhere behind you is freaky. The scariest part of the game isn't really the monsters you have to fight or avoid, it's the whole damn town itself.
Then there is Pyramid Head. He won't die from anything you inflict on him, and all you can do is just hope he will go away.
I like the fact that in a game I have to choose to walk into the next room, knowing full well that demons and zombies are bound to jump out of the vents and closets when I get there. The dread comes from having to choose to put yourself in harms way so as to progress in the game. On top of that you are playing in the perspective of the character, rather than a third party merely observing the scene. This makes it easier to relate to the hero on a more personal level.
In a movie I often choose to not care about the cast, as the characters of horror films often do stupid things to get themselves in scarey situations, so I end up being more amused by their impending fate rather than fearful.
It's hard to say one is better, or more scary than the other. Each media has its own distinct differences that the other cannot really emulate.
As has been stated already, video games can be more immersive. You're actually controlling a lot of the action. So in a sense, you have a more vested interest in preserving your life. So when that zombie jumps through the window, it's more tense reacting to and dealing with it.
But what movies have going from them is the helpless lack of control. Take the Resident Evil example. You're confronted with the zombie through the window. While you are initially shocked, you can deal with the situation. You have a gigantic shotgun and tons of ammo, so your reaction to the shock is to go aggressive and blast the zombie.
Movies however can set you up in a helpless situation. You can see the zombie creeping up on the hero, but the hero doesn't see him. There's nothing you can do except watch. That's its own unique type of horror -- a sense of helplessness to prevent or react to what's going on.
Eternal Darkness was probably my favorite example of this. The game intentionally made you think you were going nuts as a game PLAYER while you were playing--psychological tricks like suddenly dying and losing the game just to flash to your character realizing it wasn't real, system error messages making you think your game just crashed just to have your character wake up and ask, 'What the hell was that?' and so on. :) It wasn't just a horror game--which it was, dark and disturbing--but it was also psychological and aimed at the player rather than only telling you the story of an on-screen character.
While all genres have made their way into videogames, horror is the only one I can think of that's grown its own significant subgenre there: Survival Horror. There is precident for survival horror in films, especially Romero's movies, but true survival horror seems to require interaction. It's not enough to emote with a character onscreen making choices with uncertain outcomes, it's when those choices are yours to make that the hair really stands up on the back of your neck.
I'd be lying if I said I was absolutely ******* terrified after playing 3D Monster Maze on the ZX81... but it certainly did a good job of getting you panicking when you saw Rex coming down the corridor at you. (Shame the guy in that video turns just before he gets eaten, so you don't see Rex close-up).
The ZX81 didn't have "polygons".... it didn't even have colour or high-resolution graphics (and those were the days when 256 x 200 was considered "high resolution"). It didn't even have bloody sound!.... Midi would have been an incredible luxury (seriously). This might sound like the "Three Yorkshiremen sketch", but it's absolutely true.
And I remember my Dad jumping the first time this happened on "Rescue on Fractalus".
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I really enjoy horror films. It's a shame there are so few good ones. Blood and gore aren't scary, they're just gross. Pulling your audience in, making them believe one thing and then jerking the carpet out from under them leaves a much deeper impact. The gaming industry is learning this.
I thoroughly enjoyed "Saw" for it's suspense. It wasn't really a gory film at all despite what the author of TFA says. I'd wager only a few gallons of fake blood were used in both Saw movies. "Saw II" and the pit of needles... that freaked me out enough that I was squirming in the theater seat and turning my head away from the screen. We each have our own deepest fears. "Dusk til Dawn" had blood by the 55 gallon drum, but it wasn't scary at all. "Hostel," rated as the scariest movie of 2006, was pathetically tame and generally stupid. (Push the eye back in, idiot, don't snip it off.) The wife discovering her husband had killed in "What Lies Beneath" or the little boy's reaction of "You weren't supposed to help her," in "The Ring" were classic, gut-wrenching twists.
I played the BioShock demo. Once I got past the immature gore, it did develop into a layered, creepy environment with a fairly original story. I didn't like it well enough to buy it, but with the lack of quality horror films, I may start turning to horror games more often. I just hope they aren't all FPS since that's my least favorite genre.
Any wagers on a Cthulu MMO?
Mind you, if your adrenaline is kicking in, it's because you're scared and your body is entering a fight-or-flight response. So, yeah, video games can be scary.
That said, really good video games horror requires good pacing and design. In lots of games, yeah, it's all action. But it doesn't need to be that way. F.E.A.R. did a great job on pacing, intermixing the terror and adrenaline of high speed combat with the creeping dread and occasional scares in the slower parts. And while I was downright bored with Resident Evil 4 by the end, the initial buildup was great. The first time the true nature of the situation appeared, it scared the hell out of me. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth has an hour or two of great dread at the beginning before the "real" action starts. The transition from buildup to action in the hotel is full of adrenaline, but it's very much a "oh crap, oh hell, what next" scared sort of adrenaline. (It does lose a lot of it's scariness after then 10th time you've retried it. It's a bit unforgiving.) The original Call of Duty was amazingly good at scaring me, not in a traditional horror sense, but in making me fearful and cautious with brief spasms of terror as things seemed to go to hell. Meanwhile, you can totally avoid the adrenaline rush if you're willing to play games with slower pace. I highly recommend Anchorhead, which is the finest horror game I've ever played. For the first three quarters of the game, it's relatively slow paced and all about the slow buildup of information as you discover the terrible things going on, and then discovering that it's worse than it originally seemed.
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DOOM 3 (if you play in a dark room w/only the game going)
Condemned : Criminal Origins
those games are freaky and fun.
I've played a couple of the Silent Hill games, and they were damn scary, more than any movie I've seen. But Bioshock even surpasses them. Stuff like fighting a Big Daddy, running through a door and waiting for it to come, then checking to find it right there ready to attack you, or running from one and getting boxed into a corner, frantically trying to get out and run to a safer distance can get pretty terrifying. And the most terrifying experience in any video game I've ever played was walking into a room which filled with steam. The steam cleared, and there was a splicer standing right in front of me, _staring_ at me. I reacted first and shot the hell out of it out of "OMG WTF!!!" reflexes, and now I wonder what would have happened if I'd waited just a little longer.
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I would have to vote for Diablo 1. The Butcher's Lair with bodies everywhere, small square room covered in blood and just a few words in a deep evil voice "Ahh, fresh meat!". You better be prepared to defend yourself against a fat man with a huge rusty cleaver.
Even the most menial FPS game, like Medal of Honor.
I was playing Multiplayer MOH:AA. At the time I had a slide out keyboard tray with a slide out mouse tray beneath it. Some Nazi startled the hell out of me so badly that I slammed my mouse into the metal rail of the keyboard tray, splitting the top and bottom half apart.
Well not now but during the game. It puts you into the role of a serial killer who is encouraged to photograph his victims on occasion. This interpretation goes slightly beyond the game authors intentions I suppose, but probably is not too far off. Replayability has gone out the window for me. I'll stick to Lost Coast it is short and fits into this much more positive Half Life 2 setting.
Oops now that I've read the article I notice that he also wrote about Bioshock - no surprise really.
The fact that you are more physically engaged in a game, you are at least pushing the keys and moving the mouse, and that the game responds to your actions certainly makes it more immersive than some horror flick. It is not even possible that you can loose track as might happen when watching a movie. You are always in sync with what is happening, thereby allowing optimal use of your input bandwidth. Bioshock really reaches a good trade off between forcing you into a role and letting you control the flow of the action. This is a fairly new quality compared to some horror movies where you can be scared if you like but you don't take part so to speak.
One might argue that one should be able separate between the imaginary world of a game and real life, but when all effort is made to draw you into it you can still be disgusted about it I suppose. Or view it from a different perspective, if a game can reach as far as to make you feel uncomfortable about a role you are playing it certainly is the better game than one which doesn't allow you to make that connection to the real world but still racks up the body count.
Je me souviens.
I have to agree, the horror games I've played are much more intense than any movie. I had to play through Fatal Frame: Crimson Butterflies in 15 minute increments.
Unreal -- the first one -- surprisingly had lots of really scary moments. In the first few areas, there's a place where you have to shut the power down. You start hearing a loud 'thunk' noise, but it's hard to tell where it's coming from. When you start to leave, the way is barred, and you start wondering if you took a wrong turn.
Then the light start going out.
Pretty soon, you're in the dark, and you realize that there's no music or sound or anything. If you've still got your wits about you, you'll toss a couple of flares out, but man, who remembers to do that the first time.
Then the emergency lights come on, the music and sound start pounding, and there's a green thing leaping out of the wall at you and you flail around and blast away blast away oh god what the hell is it dead?
Then the lights come on and you reload the game so you can do it again without losing half your life, but DAMN, that was a hell of a thing.
System Shock 2 was creepy as hell; I couldn't finish it. BioShock is many kinds of awesome.
The thing that all the games have in common is ATMOSPHERE. They've got a particular kind of ambiance that really draws you in. The music and the sounds are all part of it. Water drips, things are in disarray, and you're constantly set upon by low moaning caricatures of humanity. Hearing a zombie in SS2 moan, "I'm sorry," before clubbing you is creepy. Hearing a slicer mumble to himself about how he JUST NEEDS SOMEONE TO TALK TO is really creepy.
The whole package is amazing if it's put together right. The visuals, setting, and sound all come together and leave you to fill in the action. How in the world could a movie be as scary? It's not you being attacked. Your own self-preservation kicks in because you're role-playing someone in a desperate situation.
It's fantastic. I'm so glad BioShock came out. I'm gonna play it to death.
For the sake of background .. I can honestly attest to the fact that horror movies and even haunted houses have maybe made me "jump" at most a dozen times combined during my lifetime.
However .. Bioshock nailed me quite a few times. Playing through the game on hard (and then again on easy for achievements) .. even the second time around it still caught me.
The first time I experienced what might be classified as "dread" and "horror" was honestly when my roommate insisted that I tried harvesting the little girl instead of rescuing her. Not only did I feel remorse about even contemplating the action, but once it got underway it really got to me. (I still almost can't stand listening to them cry over fallen Big Daddies) .. when you get to the Orphanage later on in the game .. let's just say the decor in some of those rooms really got to me.
The other notable experience I had was in Fort Frolic .. fair warning: Not much of a spoiler but maybe an experience you might not want to lose follows.
I was running around in a downstairs room that was flooded. Throughout the level there are a lot of what I can only describe as "statues" of dead people in different poses, but they look like they have been frosted white. I was creeping through this room (and the game is brilliant for that alone .. you don't run and gun this ride), and completely ignoring these statues (I knew them to be benign .. I already finished the level and was hunting down things after the fact) .. I tracked down an item in the corner and when I turned around some of the statues had disappeared. I wondered a bit about it, then made my way out when I heard a splash behind me (5.1 sound) .. I spun around and nothing was there. Turns out some of the "Spider Slicers" that I thought were inanimate were anything but .. it was freaky. Later on in the level I spotted a few of them crawling around on the ceilings in another area .. just creeping away from me (even after taking a few potshots).
The last part of the underground sequence in the Russian first-person action RPG was pretty scary, in a good way. :) The game really feels like a second life; the atmosphere is very good.
Just think of Daikatana.
They got the poison headcrabs just right in HL2. From the sound effects, to the tarantula-inspired banding on the legs and the hairiness... urgh.
I recently bought a HD-Tv - explicitly for Bioshock. While waiting for my copy to arrive, I put HL2 back on and raced through the first couple of levels. I ended up having to switch off partway through Ravenholm - even though I've completed the game a few times previously. The bigger visuals, more expansive sub and sensory overload drew me in just as effectively as it did first time around.
[Still, I remember screaming like a girl at the Scrags in "The Air Tunnels" in Quake 1, many years ago.]
F_T
I know this might sound a bit different to give as an analogy, but here goes. Remember the haunted houses (the really well done ones) during Halloween that you and some of your friends you used to walk through knowing fully well that this house is full of creepy/scary things that are meant to pounce on you. Well now imagine the difference between you actually walking through the house all by yourself and having to fend for yourself all along with everything that goes pop as against a friend of yours telling his/her experience in the most dramatic fashion with all the visual/audio effects and creating the atmosphere of tension for you. If you can get this picture in your head (I tried this with a friend was not very successful) then you know the difference between what a game does for you compared to a movie.
Personally the scariest moment for me has been a game, the game being FEAR was playing it one night alone in my office with the lights off and the scene where the ghost of the kid comes up the first time scared the crap out of me so much so that I switched on the lights and had to take a walk around before resuming the game again.
This is not a signature...no seriously!
One night I had a few friends over for some beers. Now, I live out in the country where it takes very little to loose 'lectricity. A couple of us were outside whilst the other fellow was inside playing Doom3, since as a console gamer he had not played yet. At some point the power went out, but I do have roughly 1.5kVa worth of battery backup so the computer, monitor and other stuff was still on. It happened at just that point one of the baddies was in the process of jumping out from a hidden panel, as they are wont to do in D3.
Said friend had a couple beers in him and wasn't the brightest to begin with so he thought it was part of the game and came running outside looking as though he had seen a ghost. It was worth a few laughs, though it's a pitty he hadn't pissed himself.
tinfoilmedia
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Pathways into Darkness by Bungie. The monsters in that game were difficult to kill, snuck up on you, and looked scary as hell. It was a really challenging game as well. I just remember playing it as a kid and jumping out of my seat every time one of those dinosaur things jumped out of a corner.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
It was a crappy game but it could surely scare you every time Jason jumped in front of you while you were snooping around the cabins rooms.
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The first levels in AVP1 were the most freaky, since you were pretty much waiting for aliens to jump out of nowhere... (although it helps to have watched the movie first, I think). I still remember deathmatching a few buddies late at night on AVP2, and hearing them complain that hearing the tickety-tick of my facehugger's claws had them looking around frantically and getting more than a little freaked out in real life
Now that game was great, really atmospheric but had enough twitchy sections to keep you engaged. I find that video games tend to be "boo-scary", which works well in the short term, but they tend (with some exceptions) to be light on truly ominous atmosphere and literal horror. Most main-stream American horror is the same way. Gore aside, because that's kind of its own phenomenon, a thing is scary because it's both threatening and unexpected. For example, a monster jumping out of a closet behind you is scary. Horror is more subtle, but longer lasting. For example, hiding in a dark room from a monster scratching at the door and falling asleep, only to wake up the next day and notice that the scratch marks are on the inside. Good horror movies do a little of both, and because you're watching a movie to be entertained (whereas you play a game to entertain yourself) you're more open to allowing the story and the mood to be established at a slower pace than if you were playing a game. A game's got to grab you quickly and keep you involved, which is effective in it's own right if it makes you feel as if the events in the game are or could be happening to you, but a movie can take its time and establish backstory, characters, plot, mood, all without having to do double duty as an entertaining game.
For example, try to make a game out of The Omen that produces the same impact as the movie.
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The last time any type of fictional material creeped me out in any way, was when I found the dead body in the large flower pot in the classic Sierra game Phantasmagoria. I'm not easily disturbed, but that scene got me. Of course I was a lot younger then. Nothing I have seen since, as far as fictional material goes, has had that affect.
Just because you can, does not mean you should.
Alma Wade http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4NmNwKaHj8&mode=re lated&search= WARNING: Contains all the scenes from the game where Alma visits. Don't watch if you have a heart condition.
This game freaked me out, in the last two levels I could only play 5 minutes at a time. I was so stressed out, that after playing I felt exhausted. But, it's by far the best experience I've ever had playing a game. So immersive, so freaky. I got chills just watching the Youtube clip.
Don't watch if you haven't played the game, just grab the game and play it :)
Well I always find when I play even games like Oblivion and Im doing the Dark Brotherhood guild I will start off playing happily.
But after an hour or to when all lifes problems have dissapeared and I am fully consumed by the game a ghost will come popping out of a side hallway and it will scare the crap out of me. Now if I were just miniutes into the game it would not have had the same effect.
So it is true the more you become immersed within the game the more the game elements affects your emotions including fear.
I slipped and modded him troll, when I meant Interesting. So, I'm undoing the Troll with this post.
Damn you, AJAX! If we're gonna build web apps, we need undo.
I have never found horror movies scary, but I will never forget the first time I played the original Resident Evil... creeping down that one hallway, it's deadly quiet, and then those dog things crashed through the window and I nearly shit my pants.
The immersion factor FTW.
As a writer and lover of well-written English, I agree: The First Resident Evil is terrifying. "Now it's Wesker's time to disappear!"
The simple truth of this discussion is there is no right answer. It comes down to the individual. What do you find to be a more involving experience? Most horror movies that try to build up a scary atmosphere and have lots of boo scares and jumps and monsters tend to turn into silly action romps or simply fail to engage me in the way the game did. Resident Evil the game is way more intense than the movie. Same goes for Doom. Also, games can be intense in a visceral sense, but hardly in an emotional or psychological sense, whereas a good deal of well made horror films have more to do with the characters portrayed than the number of scares they can elicit from the audience. In short, pick your own poison, but especially with the current trend in silly horror films, I find certain games to be far more frightening than many movies I've seen.