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.

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.

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.