I’d have to say Silent Hill. Scared the heck out of me once. This was during the Big Storm of '96, and since the roads were all deserted on the way home from my friend’s house (he had the game) it was a very nerve-racking drive. :eek:
My second guess would be the Britney Spears dancing game I saw for rent. Ah, the humanity! Of course, if the pixels bounce accurately…
Grand Theft Auto 3.
Play a main character who’s a complely antisocial psychopath with no reedeming social values.
Commit theft, murder, arson, etc, etc.
Run around attacking passerby with a bat for no reason.
Get a sniper rifle and play clocktower looney.
Banned in Australia for sexual violence.
Totally fun.
Second Silent Hill. That game still gives me the heebie-jeebies, and I’ve beat it probably ten times or so.
And a third vote for Silent Hill. The sequel gets high marks, as well, but it was so damned short that it gets knocked down by its predecessor.
I’d say the only time I’d been overly disturbed by a game is playing Turok 2. I’m going through the level with the giant tarantulas (and I’m using the “full ammo” cheat so as to torch every single one of the horrid little things with the handy flamethrower), and just finished fighting off one of the mini-boss gigantic spiders [shudder]. Looking for the climbable wall to get out of the area, I look up at just the wrong moment and get nothing less than a "mini"spider landing flat on the view and writhing around (supposedly on the character’s face), filling my entire screen with twitching arachnid legs as the speakers blast out its awful hissing.
I couldn’t turn off the game fast enough. Can you tell I’m an arachniphope?
I think the nod for me has to go to Resident Evil 2. The first time I played this, I was with a bunch of my friends at a cabin in the woods, late at night, with all the lights off. Several parts of the game got every single one of us to jump. Even when I played it years later it still scared me.
As for “disturbing”, well I don’t know. Pretty much the more, the better. GTA3 is my favorite game ever!
Floor 13.
I had a nice long write-up on this game, went so spell check it, Windows core dumped.
Lovely.
Any ways, great game, very disturbing in soly* the thoughts that it makes you confront amount human life. Nothing particularly graphic is needed (what it has is definitely enough), definitely old school type of a game, but at the height of the genre.
Makes you stop and think in the middle of playing “Holy … I cannot believe I just did that … what the hell am I becoming?”
Not bad for an old DOS game to accomplish. 
*misspelt, but the number of misspellings on Google has reached critical mass so Google no longer tries to suggest corrections to it, and Spellcheck.net is being completely unhelpful.
Any first person shooters freak me out for the first few weeks of playing. Goldeneye I returned after buying because I realized I was scared to play it. Perfect Dark I ended up playing but never got very far.
Now I am on to Halo. Here I am, 19 year old male, and I played this game on my dad’s home theater system…SCARED ME SHITLESS! Bungie has done a great job with that game. I have since gotten used to the game and I think by FAR it is the better of the three.
I know…I’m a wuss though…
Doom. Jesus Christ, I would stay up at night playing this game with all the lights out.
When I first met the Cyber-Demon boss in the second act, I was too damn scared to even go into the main room. When I did try, I promptly got blown to tiny giblets, with my feet still standing in a pool of guts and blood. I could see the Demon’s hooves near my ghastly remains.
Yup, gotta be Doom.
Scaryest game, definatly pokemon, those little critters are so fierce
Scared the hell out of me on more then one occasion. Running around a ship with zombies is all fine and dandy. But I’d be in an area where I thought I was alone and all the sudden I’d hear from behind me “Join the many” in a loud voice that made me jump. The game had several of those moments.
Marc
Years ago, before the official Alien vs. Predator game, an avid gamer and fan of the Alien films put out an Alien patch for Quake 2. He was soon forced to take it offline by Fox, but I was lucky enough to download it before that happened. It was the only time in my life a video game truly scared me. He did it PERFECTLY. Flashing, half-working lights, misty atmosphere, creatures coming out of nowhere. I remember a part where I went down an elevator. I opened a door and a facehugger jumped at me immediately. I literally jumped out of the way (falling off my chair) because I was so scared.
Hitman Codename 47. I dunno, something about strangeling a man while he takes a wizz in the sewer that is just very disturbing. A good game none the less.
There are any number of games using the ‘Nocturne’ engine that make my hair stand on end. Blue Noise really works on me.
Both System Shock games were quite scary. They made very effective use of sound and lighting conditions, but the best thing was that they really pulled you into what happened to all the people. In both games you frequently find personal logs that the crew of the space station (in SS1, it was a starship on SS2) recorded before they were killed. So you got a glimpse of the personalities and sometimes you even heard recordings of their actual death.
There was one especially creepy scenario where you had to figure out how to open a certain door on the space station. The door had a retinal scanner security system and your character didn’t have clearance. The solution: You had to find the head of the station’s security chief. Then carry the head with you back to the door and hold it up in front of the scanner.
Like MGibson, I jumped many times playing these games.
Let me jump on the Silent Hill band wagon.
Oh… my… God!
I had no idea what to expect. A friend of mine just handed me the game and said, “Dude, you gotta play this.”
So I did.
Yes, it’s kinda scary with the flying things and and all of that, but when the nice, foggy world, uh, changes… it just tripped me out! It seriously put me into this weird frame of mind. I actually felt different. What can I say - it affected me.
Actually, the weirdest thing happened to me: One night, while I was playing it and was stuck in the nightmare world, I decided I had had enough, so I shut the game off and went to sleep. So the next morning (I get up around 5:00am - so it’s totally dark outside - the mood is set), as I left my apartment to go to work, but I forgot that my apartment complex decided to re-paint the hallways - so it being 5:00am, and not really remembering this, when I opened my door, all the hallways were stripped of their normal, familiar wall paper, leaving this very dark, odd-looking, musty-smelling, runny brownish residue all over the place. This was not my regular hallway… I WAS IN THE NIGHTMARE WORLD!!!
Totally tripped me out!
All I needed was for one of those little black, chirping, baby ghosts to walk by and I would have completely lost it!
They had a patch like that for either Doom or Doom 2, I don’t remember which. Normally the game never scared me, but I hated that Alien patch, it creeped me out so badly I never got that far in the game. Scary!
Actually, having read all of these responses, I’m disturbed that I didn’t mention GTA3 as being disturbing!
Silent Hill was especially bad for a friend of mine who is a teacher, and had to go to work the next day. He said he didn’t stay after for a week.
As for PC games, anyone ever play The 7th Guest? weird weird game. “Want a balloon?”
You are talking about the one for the Atari Jaguar game console, right?
Damn scary game – nothing makes you leap six feet into the air than pacing through the corridors and suddenly having an invisible Predator chittering by your side…
But I wouldn’t call it “disturbing.”
HalfLife makes me jump everytime I play it. Everything’s all quiet when BAM those little crabs start attacking!
I just got Resident Evil for GameCube. I hope it gives me the screaming heebie jeebies.