Way back? That was practically yesterday.
Too many Doom scares to list really:
First time you see the Cyber Demon - what the holy shit is that! RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY! Stomp, Stomp, Stomp WOOSH KERBLAM! argh. . .(dies in pieces)
A bunch a walls fall away to reveal shit-loads of baddies RUN AW…
Turn a corner and be attacked by your first flaming-skull-thing WTF!
Almost any of the claustraphobic maze sections, hey it’s awfully quiet… POUNCE! ARGH!
No other game has had me jump as high or as often. Though for prolonged tension Alien vs. Pred wins hands down. Doom was mostly about running not creeping 
It probably helped that the first AvP that I played didn’t let you save between levels, dead? start again. I liked a review I saw when AvP first came out. They liked the game a lot but felt the need to describe the playing experience: Play as a marine, you will die. A lot. Play as an Alien, you will die. Often. Play as… well you get the idea.
AvP? After getting pasted very quickly on the demo as a Marine, I finally got somewhere (maybe 10 mins into the level) conserving ammo, sweeping rooms with the motion detector. Then my mate wanders into the room, rips me out of the AvP world and my heart goes! Then an Alien gets me and my heart goes again! :smack: 
Really? That’s odd. Mine ran like a charm. Never needed to patch it, and I’m pretty sure I got a copy right when it came out. Maybe I just had more compatible hardware than you did, or something.
That was amazing.
Aliens vs Predator on the Atari Jaguar pretty much defined FPS terror for me. Silent Hill 1 remains the absolute creepiest game of all time for me. I have probably played through that game at least thirty times, and no matter how much I know about what’s coming and where to go, no matter how much I swear to myself “I will not panic I will not panic” I usually lose it in
- School comma evil
- Hospitol comma fucking moaning nurses
- Dark Silent Hill after defeating the larvae (if I never hear another flapping sound it will be too soon)
- Nowhere
I can play video games without getting up except for food or pee breakes for up to 24 hours (healthy as that is), but I’ve never finished SH1 without pausing/saving and just taking a friggin’ breather (and turning on the lights).
SH2, the prison was pretty scary, and the first apartment complex creeped me out (the lighting was amazing). But mostly, SH2 was a dark story with some horrific elements, I didn’t think it was especially scary.
SH3 was awesome. Rivalled 1 in scariness, I thought. The mirror room, mentioned above… christ. I definitely had to pause the game after that.
Miller I doubt it was a hardware problem. For those who aren’t familiar with GK2-Beast Within, you have to do certain things, talk to certain people, and get certain objects before the day will end and you can move on to the next one. I got stuck on day four and couldn’t figure out what else I had to do. After racking my brain, I finally looked at a walkthrough. I couldn’t believe what I saw and checked other sites. They confirmed that I had done everything I was supposed to and that the game should move on to the next day. I went to Sierra’s official site. They had a patch for this problem. I downloaded the patch. My old saves were now ‘saved under different interpreter.’ and wouldn’t load. So I started over. Now, despite the fact that I had definitely done everything I had to on day one, the program would not end that day and move on to day two. This was definitely a software problem.
IIRC it was bout this time that Turin’s Passage came out. In this delightful fantasy suitable for children (surprisingly, it’s the work of Al Lowe, the man behind Leisure Suit Larry), you move through different nested worlds. A bug in the game keeps the program from recognizing a certain object as an object, making it impossible to pick up or use. You can skip to the second world, but the bug makes it imposible to beat the first.
7th Guest was a great game. It could definitely be really scary at times.
This is going to sound really lame, but the computer game of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. At the end, if you pick the wrong grail you, of course, die. Well, the first time I played it all the way through I wasn’t paying attention to all the clues in the game that would basically tell you what the grail was. Also, this was the original release of the game (complete with grail diary and, of course, copyright protection) and not one of the LucasArts greatest hits or whatever rereleases, so I was playing it when I was about 8 or 9. So anyway, I get to the end of the game and pick the wrong grail. The PC speaker put out this god-awful blaring chord that scared the crap out of me. The picture of you looking about as Donovan does in the movie didn’t help. Plus, that was easily the part of the movie that scared me the most anyway. I still don’t like it, and it’s more than a decade later.
I had forgotten about that, but it freaked me out as well the first time I saw it. Quite a few times afterwards I would look away from the screen when that scene came up. If I heard nothing and the music began playing again, I’d look back.
DocCathode: I had a similar problem with the game Black Dahlia. It was a really cool game. At least, the first disk was pretty cool. At one point on the first day (maybe the second: still very early in the game, at any rate) you’re supposed to return to a previous location, where a Nazi spy shows up and takes a pot shot at you. Despite doing everything I needed to do, as confirmed through several different walkthroughs, that damned Nazi never showed up to try to kill me. Which really pissed me off, because if there’s one thing you can usually say about fascists, it’s that they’re punctual.
Still have the game, too, taking up two whole pages in my PC CD binder. Always wondered what happens on the other seven disks…
[aside] If you like the creepy atmosphere and style of the Silent Hill games, see the movie Jacob’s Ladder. The designers of the game clearly watched it one too many times. [/aside]
I’ll have to repeat System Shock 2. Especially when you find the shit that went down on Deck 3. It wasnt just that the game was scary, it was so incredibly immersing. The feeling of being all alone, up in that ship, with that constant droning sound of the engines everywhere you went.
Sniff Sniff. They just don’t seem to make games like they used to.
For anyone that’s getting nostalgic about System Shock 2 I can’t recommend this Texture pack enough. It makes the zombies and corpses much better looking.
Unfortunately it doesn’t look like he’ll ever finish it totally it is worth it for just those updates.
Glad to see so much talk about the Gabriel Knight series. I was young enough when the first two games were released that I wasn’t allowed to play them due to the “Mature” rating, and only finally managed to track them all down as an adult two years ago. They’re all great games, but Sins of the Fathers is definitely my favorite.
I wasn’t so creeped out by the golems (although I also thought they were zombies), but there were some truly scary moments a little earlier in the game as it becomes obvious that THEY are interfering with your investigation. . .by killing your contacts!
Yeah. Just let the game happen. Don’t be all "Woo-woo! We are having a cutscene full of REAL MOVING ACTORS now. Just make a game.
The fade-to-black after Gabriel’s done with the German-speaking hoochie and Baron Von Glower (a great character for all that his name screams, “Schattenjager! Bad guy over here!”) comes into the bedroom and watches him sleep, though…anything could have happened. That’s what I keep telling myself, and that’s what I’ll keep believing. I had such a crush on Von Glower even though he was clearly all about the Big Gay Love; if I couldn’t have him, at least Gabe could.
If you didn’t like him in the first one (I thought he was generally unexceptional, but he had some very good moments), the third one would have made you stab yourself through the ears. I have to assume he didn’t even go back and review tapes from Sins of the Fathers – it’s an almost totally different accent. I wish they’d gotten Leah Rimini back for Grace’s voice again, too.
The third game is good, but it’s a good example of how far the adventure game has fallen. The ridiculous passport puzzle in the first day might have flown in a fantasy/comedy adventure, but I couldn’t buy a maple-syrup-and-cat-hair mustache as part of the series that had a man cut his heart from his own chest. Bah. But the rest pretty much made up for it. Jane Jensen’s no Roberta Williams, but she acquitted herself.
HPL, did the second book retcon as heavily as the first one? Things like Gabriel’s age, his grandmother’s name. some Ritter backstory, etc. were very different in the first book vs. the first game.
My obsession is showing and things are beyond hijacked. Sorry, OP. :smack:
Wait, are you saying she’s better or worse? Cause Gabriel Knight is so much better than King’s Quest it’s like comparing Enid Blyton and Charles Dickens.
That game had such a creepy atmosphere. It always felt like there was a pall of death and fear hanging over the city. The encounter with the fortune teller, the cemetary, the suprise in the shop on St. John’s eve, and almost as bad as the golems, that creepy guy who just sat outside the shop for 2 days straight, never moving, never talking, just staring into the shop.
WATCHING. YOUR. EVERY. MOVE.
and making sure you knew it.
That guy gave me the creeps.
I think Jensen is unquestionably the better writer, but King’s Quest defined the genre. She set the bar for adventure games and women in games.
The third game I worked pretty well for me, though the camera control was annoying at times, and the story is fodder for far too many conpriacy theories, but they did a fairly good job with it. The puzzles and voice acting didn’t bother me, what bugged me was the arcade seqences, most notable in the final area.
I love it when Gaberial first enters that huge room with the pendulem and spinning wheel. If you look at it, Gaberial says “Now I know why the Templers were excommunicated. They were Sadists”.
It’s been a while, but I don’t recall the 2nd book going into gabriel’s past nearly as much as the first one. THey had dealt with that in the 1st game pretty well. Rather, I think it went more into the past of Von Glower and also into Ludwig.
There was also an interesting sequence around the time of the Opera describing how Gabe-as-wolf saw that whole change of events, giving more insight into how Jensen’s werewolves work.
The first mission in Medal of Honor: Allied Assault has you, an infantryman, on a transport approching one of the beaches in Normandy. You can hear the putter of the engine, the waves lapping at the hull, the squad captain giving last minute orders. Off in the distance you see the beach appear, then the tank barricades and barbed wire, then the massive concrete machine gun nests. Before you know it, the ramp is down, you are getting shoved out, and all you hear are thousands of bullets wizzing by you, pinging off the metal barricades, hitting other men (or you if you’re unlucky), and the shouts and screams of battle. It is D-Day, and you have to get to those bunkers and take them out. As you play this mission, you will find yourself ducking and weaving in your chair in an attempt to stay alive.
[quote=Mr2001]
Silent Hill 3: A room with a mirror. Oh, you know the one I mean. That was the first time I had to put the game on hold until I calmed down.
I don’t even know this game and I want to know what happened already. Would somebody tell me?
The only excuse I can make for that puzzle is that they wanted to start off with something light, self-contained, and not too difficult for people new to such games. But yeah, it was pretty darn silly.
*Maybe we should start a support group together!
Me too. <shudder> What a great game that was. Too bad it won’t run on my current laptop. 