Similar moment in Vampire: The Masqerade - Blodlines. Everyone raves about how the haunted mansion bit is scary, but there is another segment where the player must go into a museum in search of a sarcophagus, the player starts facing the backdoor to the museum and on the other side of the door is this giant raptor's head (The dinosaur) just lying there which is obviously part of one of the exhibits. This stupid head made me flinch the first time I saw it, and laugh my head off after reading a paper note adjacent to the raptor's head which reads something to the effect of "Dammit! This thing scared me, move it to where it's supposed to be!"
So I felt a little relieved in knowing I wasn't the only one that jumped at the giant, fake raptor head.
It's funny you should mention Fractalus because for me, many of the "great scares" that I'll never forget in videogames are the type where your screen is suddenly filled with something nasty.
Rescue on Fractalus was the first of this type, another I remember was an Amiga and Atari ST 2.5D game called Corporation from Core Design, I vaguely remember what the game is about, something about a corporation dabbling in genetic research and creating various mutated nasties and the player being an agent tasked with retrieving a sample embryio to bring them down. Anyway, in the game there was a particular type of enemy, a robotic spider that could crawl along the floors and ceiling whose function it was to repair any lights or hardware you broke during your task. Except they also had another function: Drop down from the ceiling and attach themselves into your face, suddenly filling your entire screen and making horrible shrieking noises. This was one of the few times a game has made me take my hands off the mouse and keyboard.
The next game to do this was the original Aliens vs Predator with the little facehugger aliens, I only let one of these little bastards latch on once and scared the living daylights out of me. Any following encounter with a facehugger warranted the use of the heaviest weaponry available. Not even the predators in the game warranted such heavy artillery, just the basic pulse rifle and grenades. But the second I'd hear the "squish squish" of a facehugger? The miniguns and rocket launchers come out.
Finally, there's a little-known game from Japan called "Kuon" which features a similar scene. The game itself is a typical survival horror third person perspective game, and the scare itself is pretty standard and generic: At one point during the game, you come across a small hole in a wall that let's the player peep into an adjacent locked room. The first time looking in, the view switches to a first person perspective of the hole and the player sees a ghostly female figure crawling about and going under a small bedside chest of drawers, the scene itself is pretty tame. I continue the journey and eventually get stuck about an hour later, as is usually the case with this type of game, and you're left walking around wondering what to do next, getting to the point of trying to use everything on your inventory on everything that can be used in the game world, the kind of shotgun solution that will usually get the game moving again. During this broad approach I tried using the hole in the wall again, the view once again switches to a first person perspective of the hole and the room on the other side but there is nothing, I'm about to hit the cancel button and HOLY COW! The ghost's face suddenly pops up from below, filling the entire peephole with its creepy, angry eye and giving me what was probably the most unexpected scare and adrenaline high I'd ever experienced in a game.
This is a scan of the boxart for The Elder Scrolls: Arena. I always wondered why the guys got to wear all the armor, I guess the life span of a lady fighter was very short in those days.
No kidding, in FFX there is a mosnter arena side quest where the player can fight some special beasties (Called "Original Creations") that don't appear in the main quest. After having zero problems in taking out the final boss I decided to give this monster arena a try thinking it was going to be a piece of cake.
The first battle was rather pathetic. Selecting the first of the special bosses, the battle starts with the boss getting the first turn. WHAM! Tidus goes down in a single hit without being able to do anything. Tidus' turn would have been next but since he's now six feet under the boss gets the next turn. WHAM! Yuna goes down in one hit and is the only one that could have been able to cast resurrect. By this point I'm guessing it's pretty pointless to even try so it's "Defend" followed closely by being punched to death in one blow.
Normally I'm a pretty calm person, when my blood starts rising I'll put down the controller, drink some tea and let the pressure out. After having tried to kill this damn brute for the 30th time I was just about ready to kick the PS2 out to the curb.
With some perseverence and lots and lots of cursing, I managed to get through the entire monster arena and let me tell ya, I was both in tears and in shock when it was all over.
I have the exact same problem as you. First person shooters are no problem nor is riding a bus or train while sitting on one of the "backwards" seats, I can even read a book while doing so. But riding in the back seat of a car will leave me feeling queasy, trying to read a book will worsen the condition.
In my case, I've found that having a soft drink at hand to sip from and rolling down a window helps. I've never really investigated or otherwise tried to correct the problem, just basically learned to live with it all my life.
Funny you should mention it, just the other day I was playing it with a group of friends and managed to get dynamited, causing Leon to be thrown in the air and fall on his back in a position where his head was directly under Ashley's skirt. This alone was a moment worthy of a chuckle but it wasn't until Ashley yelled "Pervert!" that everyone broke into laughter.
I also watched a program about mosquitoes the other day called "Monty Python's Flying Circus - Mosquito Hunters", here's an excerpt:
"Roy: (voice over) The mosquito's a clever little bastard. You can track him for days and days until you really get to know him like a friend. He knows you're there, and you know he's there. It's a game of wits. You hate him, then you respect him, then you kill him.
(Cut to Hank Spire who stands peering toward the horizon. Suddenly he points.)
Voice Over: Suddenly Hank spots the mosquito they're after.
(Dramatic music. Crash zoom along Hank's eye-line to as big a close-up as we can get of a patch in a perfectly ordinary field. Cut back to Hank and Roy starting to crawl towards some bushes.)
Voice Over: Now more than ever, they must rely on the skills they have learnt from a lifetime's hunting. (tense music, as they worm their way forward) Hank gauges the wind. (shot of Hank doing complicated wind gauging biz.) Roy examines the mosquito's spoor. (shot of Roy examining the ground intently) Then... (Roy fires a bazooka. Hank fires off a machine gun; a series of almighty explosions in the small patch of field; the gunfire stops and the smoke begins to clear) It's a success. The mosquito now is dead. (Hank and Roy approach the scorched and blackened patch in the field) But Roy must make sure. (Roy points machine gun at head of mosquito and fires off another few rounds)
Roy: There's nothing more dangerous than a wounded mosquito."
So what we need are just a couple of well hardened Aussies called Roy and Hank.
"Ummm...actually, she did talk to you. She just spoke a language that the character did not understand. This was conveyed by odd symbols instead of the English captions (at least in the English version) that you saw when the boy spoke. That was actually part of the mystery in the game for me. The boy was compelled to help her based only on her situation and reactions, rather than her saying, "Help! Get me out of here!" In fact, I'm quite sure that was a deliberate choice on the part of the makers of the game."
There were 2 versions of the game, an NTSC and a PAL release. A little known fact by those who played the original NTSC version is that the PAL version was slightly enhanced featuring AI, self preservation and path finding enhancements for Yorda, your female companion. More interestingly, the dialog Yorda speaks, which is subtitled to alien symbols during your first playthrough, is translated into English on the 2nd playthrough.
Gamefaqs should have several FAQs for the game covering the dialog in case anyone is interested.
Slashdot Mirror
That song would is Adam Freeland's "Fear".
Don't forget red explosive barrels!
Similar moment in Vampire: The Masqerade - Blodlines. Everyone raves about how the haunted mansion bit is scary, but there is another segment where the player must go into a museum in search of a sarcophagus, the player starts facing the backdoor to the museum and on the other side of the door is this giant raptor's head (The dinosaur) just lying there which is obviously part of one of the exhibits. This stupid head made me flinch the first time I saw it, and laugh my head off after reading a paper note adjacent to the raptor's head which reads something to the effect of "Dammit! This thing scared me, move it to where it's supposed to be!"
So I felt a little relieved in knowing I wasn't the only one that jumped at the giant, fake raptor head.
It's funny you should mention Fractalus because for me, many of the "great scares" that I'll never forget in videogames are the type where your screen is suddenly filled with something nasty.
Rescue on Fractalus was the first of this type, another I remember was an Amiga and Atari ST 2.5D game called Corporation from Core Design, I vaguely remember what the game is about, something about a corporation dabbling in genetic research and creating various mutated nasties and the player being an agent tasked with retrieving a sample embryio to bring them down. Anyway, in the game there was a particular type of enemy, a robotic spider that could crawl along the floors and ceiling whose function it was to repair any lights or hardware you broke during your task. Except they also had another function: Drop down from the ceiling and attach themselves into your face, suddenly filling your entire screen and making horrible shrieking noises. This was one of the few times a game has made me take my hands off the mouse and keyboard.
The next game to do this was the original Aliens vs Predator with the little facehugger aliens, I only let one of these little bastards latch on once and scared the living daylights out of me. Any following encounter with a facehugger warranted the use of the heaviest weaponry available. Not even the predators in the game warranted such heavy artillery, just the basic pulse rifle and grenades. But the second I'd hear the "squish squish" of a facehugger? The miniguns and rocket launchers come out.
Finally, there's a little-known game from Japan called "Kuon" which features a similar scene. The game itself is a typical survival horror third person perspective game, and the scare itself is pretty standard and generic: At one point during the game, you come across a small hole in a wall that let's the player peep into an adjacent locked room. The first time looking in, the view switches to a first person perspective of the hole and the player sees a ghostly female figure crawling about and going under a small bedside chest of drawers, the scene itself is pretty tame. I continue the journey and eventually get stuck about an hour later, as is usually the case with this type of game, and you're left walking around wondering what to do next, getting to the point of trying to use everything on your inventory on everything that can be used in the game world, the kind of shotgun solution that will usually get the game moving again. During this broad approach I tried using the hole in the wall again, the view once again switches to a first person perspective of the hole and the room on the other side but there is nothing, I'm about to hit the cancel button and HOLY COW! The ghost's face suddenly pops up from below, filling the entire peephole with its creepy, angry eye and giving me what was probably the most unexpected scare and adrenaline high I'd ever experienced in a game.
I love scary games!
But can you tell me what the Eleomosynator does exactly? To this day, I still haven't got a clue.
Is there a transcript of the conversation available anywhere? I'd like to read it.
You forgot Lei Fang and Hitomi beating each other senseless over a watermelon. :)
The reason why it feels like a ripoff of Heroes of the Pacific is because it was created by the same development team.
This is a scan of the boxart for The Elder Scrolls: Arena. I always wondered why the guys got to wear all the armor, I guess the life span of a lady fighter was very short in those days.
No kidding, in FFX there is a mosnter arena side quest where the player can fight some special beasties (Called "Original Creations") that don't appear in the main quest. After having zero problems in taking out the final boss I decided to give this monster arena a try thinking it was going to be a piece of cake.
The first battle was rather pathetic. Selecting the first of the special bosses, the battle starts with the boss getting the first turn. WHAM! Tidus goes down in a single hit without being able to do anything. Tidus' turn would have been next but since he's now six feet under the boss gets the next turn. WHAM! Yuna goes down in one hit and is the only one that could have been able to cast resurrect. By this point I'm guessing it's pretty pointless to even try so it's "Defend" followed closely by being punched to death in one blow.
Normally I'm a pretty calm person, when my blood starts rising I'll put down the controller, drink some tea and let the pressure out. After having tried to kill this damn brute for the 30th time I was just about ready to kick the PS2 out to the curb.
With some perseverence and lots and lots of cursing, I managed to get through the entire monster arena and let me tell ya, I was both in tears and in shock when it was all over.
I have the exact same problem as you. First person shooters are no problem nor is riding a bus or train while sitting on one of the "backwards" seats, I can even read a book while doing so. But riding in the back seat of a car will leave me feeling queasy, trying to read a book will worsen the condition.
In my case, I've found that having a soft drink at hand to sip from and rolling down a window helps. I've never really investigated or otherwise tried to correct the problem, just basically learned to live with it all my life.
Funny you should mention it, just the other day I was playing it with a group of friends and managed to get dynamited, causing Leon to be thrown in the air and fall on his back in a position where his head was directly under Ashley's skirt. This alone was a moment worthy of a chuckle but it wasn't until Ashley yelled "Pervert!" that everyone broke into laughter.
I also watched a program about mosquitoes the other day called "Monty Python's Flying Circus - Mosquito Hunters", here's an excerpt: "Roy: (voice over) The mosquito's a clever little bastard. You can track him for days and days until you really get to know him like a friend. He knows you're there, and you know he's there. It's a game of wits. You hate him, then you respect him, then you kill him. (Cut to Hank Spire who stands peering toward the horizon. Suddenly he points.) Voice Over: Suddenly Hank spots the mosquito they're after. (Dramatic music. Crash zoom along Hank's eye-line to as big a close-up as we can get of a patch in a perfectly ordinary field. Cut back to Hank and Roy starting to crawl towards some bushes.) Voice Over: Now more than ever, they must rely on the skills they have learnt from a lifetime's hunting. (tense music, as they worm their way forward) Hank gauges the wind. (shot of Hank doing complicated wind gauging biz.) Roy examines the mosquito's spoor. (shot of Roy examining the ground intently) Then ... (Roy fires a bazooka. Hank fires off a machine gun; a series of almighty explosions in the small patch of field; the gunfire stops and the smoke begins to clear) It's a success. The mosquito now is dead. (Hank and Roy approach the scorched and blackened patch in the field) But Roy must make sure. (Roy points machine gun at head of mosquito and fires off another few rounds)
Roy: There's nothing more dangerous than a wounded mosquito."
So what we need are just a couple of well hardened Aussies called Roy and Hank.
"Ummm...actually, she did talk to you. She just spoke a language that the character did not understand. This was conveyed by odd symbols instead of the English captions (at least in the English version) that you saw when the boy spoke. That was actually part of the mystery in the game for me. The boy was compelled to help her based only on her situation and reactions, rather than her saying, "Help! Get me out of here!" In fact, I'm quite sure that was a deliberate choice on the part of the makers of the game."
There were 2 versions of the game, an NTSC and a PAL release. A little known fact by those who played the original NTSC version is that the PAL version was slightly enhanced featuring AI, self preservation and path finding enhancements for Yorda, your female companion. More interestingly, the dialog Yorda speaks, which is subtitled to alien symbols during your first playthrough, is translated into English on the 2nd playthrough.
Gamefaqs should have several FAQs for the game covering the dialog in case anyone is interested.