Scariest (and sweatiest) moments in gaming

lt_cmdr_worf

For tension, for me it was, during most missions, driving your target vehicle, on fire and ready to blow, back to base while rival gangs and cops are shooting at you, in GTA 2 and 3.

The haunted house level in Silent Hill 3 had a few s*it scary moments.

Half Life 1's opening also had me tense. The sense that something is about to go wrong as you (Gordon) came in for work, did it in.

What games made you sweat as hard as the final minutes of that Ireland v Wales rugby match?

Spunge

Last level in fear, when the power goes out i was like aww sh**.

Krieg

Scariest: I guess Thief: Deadly Shadows - shalebridge cradle. I haven't played very many horror games

Most tension: Not really able to remember any particular game moment that gave me the most tension. To be honest Im at my most tense when Im playing competitively e.g. Counter strike clan match. I remember finishing matches and having to change my t-shirt due to the sweat and heart still pounding away.

I still get a bit of it during PVP in eve online. You could spend maybe 3/4+ hours grinding away to make money to buy a good ship and then lose it in less than a minute of combat, so it can be very tense. Although the tension is subsiding as I play more and more, which is disappointing since I love the feel of tension in a game

BlitzKrieg

play the original pc Alien vs predator in multiplayer, sewer map, have it so its only 2 player one alien one space marine and play marine.

you will **** full ripe chocolate cakes.


Essentially the alien player can break almost every light in the level and the whole place is full of dark corners and ledges.

Also the alien can break any weapons the marine hasnt picked up yet (something they didnt have in the sequel ) so a good alien player can if he knows the map go as fast as the alien in alien 3 and smash every light and weapon on the map and then keep doing laps (circuler sort of map) making sure weapons like the smartgun are never picked up while setting the motion sensor off like mad.

after 2 minutes the marine will shooting wildly at any movement and grenading every doorway before entering, until finally *snap* and I have had a heart attack while my friend sniggers from his machine.

Man I miss those 2 player lans.

Queen-Mise

My scariest moment is so innocent compared to yours, I think I am still scarred from it.

Aliens again on the Playstation 1, there I was happy as larry, sitting on the bed in the dark, with the music loud on the telly. An innocent, very inexperienced gamer - I started the game, expecting some time to acclimatise to the game (I was wrong). 10 seconds in a FaceHugger attacked me completely covering the TV screen, with horrible noise. I screamed my head off, got the biggest fright of my life and never ever played Aliens again in the dark, with the music on loud.

This post may contain spoilers. Well it does. So read at your own discretion.

Scariest:
Dead Space
The zero-G bits. You're walking around. Well. Floating and flying from one place to another, bashing into random flying debris. When holy jesus ****, one of those ugly bastards appears behind you and attacks you.

F.E.A.R
Those invisible ninja guys that jump through windows, vanish, and re-appear behind you. Gah. Usually I had my trust shotgun to blast anything that makes a sound

Condemned 1
One bit always always stands out for me. You're in the school tracking down the caretaker. You approach the locker and open it up. That woman tells you to get a close up of his hand. There's a voice inside your head telling you not to. That you know something will happen.
And then you do and something does happen. And jesus! I almost jumped out of my skin.

Retr0gamer

Operation Flashpoints third mission. You're whole squad is dead leaving you alone in the woods. You have to make your way from wooded area to wooded area while tanks and armoured cars wait outside the wooded areas, soldiers search for you in the woods and a lynx attack helicopter circles overhead ready to blow you to pieces. So other excellent bits in that game like clearing out a village of enemies and hearing tanks in the distance. Being a realistic game you don't just hang around and take them out. Nope, you leg it as fast as you can.

giggsy664

Playing Fallout 3 at 1 AM wearing headphones. When you're not expecting it, a mole rat attacks you. I know mole rats ares nothig but it's **** scary!!!!

Rhyme

Silent Hill 2, Brookhaven hospital, wandering the dark corridors with the radio spitting odd bits of confusing static, is there an enemy or not? Walking around ready to beat in the head of anything and everything you see. Reach the end of a corridor and there's nothing, you've been a complete pussy for nothing, swing the torch to the right, door handle is broken, turn the left and there's a nurse with her arm above her head ready to attack.

Fell off the bed, controller ended up on a shelf behind the television, didn't play the game for six months.

Goddam i love that game.

BopNiblets

Headcrabs jumping out in HL1 and Alien vs Predator 2, running away from the aliens nest hearing all the aliens behind you screeching and your low ammo count flashing away.
"sh1tsh1tsh1tsh1tsh1t!!"

Kersmash

Hah, I'm actually playing Half-life 1 now. It does have it's tense moments. You know somethings gonna happen. Damn Headcrabs!

Overheal

Half Life 2: Ravenholm had some pretty chilly moments, when you aren't entirely sure whats coming at you - you just know it sounds very mean, and is moving very fast.

CiDeRmAn

Finding the torch in Silent Hill 2 then turing around, I nearly sh*t myself.
Also, for some reason, walking through the library in Eternal Darkness and having books float from shelf to shelf behind me.
A scene in Alone In The Dark, on the 3DO, where you are in a library, again, and read a book, it's actually a incantation and your character slowly floats into the air and has his neck snapped!
Even though it's very well known and even in the box art, the bloody dogs jumping through the windows in Resi, also the big feckin' spiders that drop from the ceiling.

Sweatiest of late was battling my evil doppleganger in Metroid Prime 3, that was tough!

silvine

System Shock 2, that level in the Hydrophonics bay.

The first half of Dead Space.

Gummy Panda

Dead Space

when you walk into the hydrophonics section for the first time and hear a really loud noise making you think either the glass on the plant display had smashed and a monster was rushing for you or a hull breach and you are exposed to space. In the end its just hoses watering the plants

cedomination

In the beginning of the original Unreal you walk through a very long narrow and winding underground tunnel. There are is nobody else around. At the end is a massive button which you have to press to continue so you press it.
You turn around to start walking back to your ship and the lights in the tunnel start turning off one by one, starting with the lights furthest from you:eek:
You have no choice but to watch the darkness get closer and closer until it is completely pitch black,thats when you hear footsteps and growling.

ctrl+alt+del,end task

Captain Chaos

Krieg wrote: »

Scariest: I guess Thief: Deadly Shadows - shalebridge cradle. I haven't played very many horror games

That's always the example I give when someone asks this question. That level alone just made the game for me, it sticks in my mind more than any other part. No other game has ever come close to matching the fear and tension that the Cradle level in Thief 3 did for me. I think the guy who designed that part of the game got an award for it and rightly so.

Resident Evil 2: The room with the glass window looking into anther room. Move across to the end of the room and as you return lickers smash through the glass and freaky music comes on. Never forget it, had me ****ting it.

5uspect

I remember one of the underground labs in STALKER creeping me out.
I don't think I ever finished Condemned. That bit in the swimming pool in the high school was when I decided I had enough.

Azza

Operation Flashpoint
I know that mission your referring to Retr0gamer and yeah was it tough. Don't think it was the third mission probably the 5th or 6th one but yeah getting from woods A too woods B was a nightmare. Time and again just as I thought I was about to make it across some crack shot Russian mofo would shoot me in the back from a mile away. No matter how many Russians I checked for and killed and no matter how clear the area looked there was always one bas***d left to kill me. In the end I said to hell with this and ran the total opposite way into some small village robbed some form of old school skoda and got chased cross country by a Soviet BMP but thats how I made it to the extraction point.

Such an awesome game!

CCCP^

Scariest? Hmmm. The first Quake game was scary and tense for me, especially some of the creatures that you fought were crazy. Those zombies are creepy.

CiDeRmAn

I played Doom for the first time on the PS and what a great game it was.
But the thing that creeped me out the most was the music, and the, what sounded like, crying children, very creepy man..

Also, Doom 3, having to swap between the feckin flashlight and your weapon, doing it at the wrong moment and finding yourself up against a horror from another dimension and instead of a pump action shotgun being reduced to bopping it over the head with a Maglight!

Fear2 is currently keeping me going, and it's not the things being done to me that's unpleasant but the other characters, very cool, reminds me of Quake 2 and the various human mincing machines left on around the place!

And as regards Quake, the zombies weren't quite so scary once you had the grenade launcher, Oh Yes!

Overheal

Actually now that I think about it, The first level in HAlo where you encounter the Flood, in the swamps.

I had just so happened to try playing that level the first time in the middle of the night, alone, with the sound way up, on Heroic (because normal is for pussies and Legendary on your first run was Stupid).

and then you're like OH THANK CHRIST THE ELEVATOR and then it starts going the wrong way, the blood starts showing up on the wall and thats the point when you realise you aren't going to make it out alive.

kaimera

shooting leimrod point blank in the face with a rpg a little while ago in a game of crysis wars to find he survived and I had no ammo left.

i cried

AnCapaillMor

Zero g bits in deadspace.

Return to castle wolfenstein, the catacombs level where you can hear the germans getting slaughtered for a few mins before you find out whats slaughtering them.

5uspect

Oh yeah, Return to Castle Wolfenstein! I remember being down in the catacombes and being faced with a fire breathing zombie thing and thinking I'm going to need a much, much bigger gun.

abelard

There was a bit in Eternal Darkness on the GC, where you went into a bathroom. The camera angle meant you couldn't see what was in the bath, until you walked over and investigated.......

I had palpatations for a while after that...

Dyr

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Operation Flashpoints third mission. You're whole squad is dead leaving you alone in the woods. You have to make your way from wooded area to wooded area while tanks and armoured cars wait outside the wooded areas, soldiers search for you in the woods and a lynx attack helicopter circles overhead ready to blow you to pieces. So other excellent bits in that game like clearing out a village of enemies and hearing tanks in the distance. Being a realistic game you don't just hang around and take them out. Nope, you leg it as fast as you can.

Yep, OP F had some heart in mouth moments.

The haunted hotel level in vampire the masquerade: bloodlines, you were jumping at everything. Also at the endgame where a bloodhunt was declared on you. You walked out the door and realized that all the streets were abandoned.....except for the many vampires waiting for you. ohshi**************** run!!

Some of the "portrait" moments in Undying.

One of my sweatiest moments was landing a plane while flying with a squadron for the first time online in IL2. I'd never landed online and everyone else had crashed out or was already landed and were waiting for me so we could change map. So all eyes were on me and I was nervous as hell. I landed it though even with the pesky tricycle undercarriage.

Cravez

Forbidden Siren: Basically at any time at all during the game when you get caught and try to hide, jack into the Shibito's vision and watch them getting closer to you through their eyes. You could be hiding under a desk and see them comming closer to the desk through their eyes *shudder*

I found pretty much any of the Aliens or Alien Vs Predator games to be quite unnerving.

Retr0gamer

How could I forget that moment in super metroid.

You kill a boss by knocking him back into a giant pool of acid and watch as it trashes about and it's skin melts off it's skeleton. Afterwards you walk back to the wall you came in on and the screen starts shaking and the boss music starts up again and the ****ers skeleton bursts through the wall. Scared the **** out of me the first time since I had **** all health left.

pablomakaveli

While exploring train tunnels in Fallout 3 i like to sneak around slowly so that i can catch enemies off guard. Doing this usually makes me all tense and alert so on the occasion a feral ghoul comes up and attacks me from behind i get quiet a shock. I've nearly fallen out of the chair a couple of times.:D

Leprachaun

Eternal Darkness. Tense AND scary!

Zillah

I am enjoying this thread.

Although I didn't continue playing the game because it was such a buggy unfun nightmare, that moment in Stalker where I first encountered a horrendous invisible monster underground was pretty damn terrifying.

Zillah

Also, there is another game I'm thinking of but cannot remember the name of. I think it was on xbox. It was Japanese and set in a spooky old house. You had a camera and the house was filled with tormented ghosts. By taking photos of the ghosts you could drive them back...I forget why but it was far less lame than it sounds and there were some truly freaktastic moments.

lt_cmdr_worf

Zillah wrote: »

Also, there is another game I'm thinking of but cannot remember the name of. I think it was on xbox. It was Japanese and set in a spooky old house. You had a camera and the house was filled with tormented ghosts. By taking photos of the ghosts you could drive them back...I forget why but it was far less lame than it sounds and there were some truly freaktastic moments.

Fatal Frame, known as Project Zero here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_Frame

Rhyme

In the vein of helplessness, Clock Tower 3. The fact that you're (almost) always running away from the enemies tenses me up like nothing else.

cedomination

abelard wrote: »

There was a bit in Eternal Darkness on the GC, where you went into a bathroom. The camera angle meant you couldn't see what was in the bath, until you walked over and investigated.......

I had palpatations for a while after that...

So what was in it?

FruitLover

cedomination wrote: »

So what was in it?

Mary Harney naked!! :eek:

I was never the same after that game...

Niska

FruitLover wrote: »

Mary Harney naked!! :eek:

I was never the same after that game...

My eyes! The goggles do nothing.

Undead

90% of Dead Space.

First and only game/film etc to genuinely scare me.

Stev_o

This was more terror in the form of "oh **** what have i done". Playing co-op with a mate on Operation Flashpoint, had to blow up two scuds amongst a armoured camp at night. Getting in was tense enough as there was tank patrols aswell as infantry going about. I set the two packs and legged it back and we both pegged it off into the darkness knowing we where about to set the hornets nest off. I press the button and run. I hear one explosion..............

My mate turns to me and says did you not set off the second one? Que ">_<" moment as i run back to get within the detonators range to set off the second charge while tanks run amok furiously.

What was even worse was our helo that was supposed to pick us up never arrived and we had to go on foot to the extraction.

quad_red

+ 1 on Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

Playing it a one am, lights out, headphones out. Fire breathing zombie coming at me, I'm desperately back peddling and trying to slow it down.

****, ****, ****!!

Class

Even though it was a mediocre game, there were some seriously pant browning moments in FEAR.

CaptainSkidmark

for me it must be the time i was playing Hidden and Dangerous 1, the level where you had to lay mines and fend off the germans before you get on the plane. i just rememeber a load of them arriving on in tanks and it was fairly sticky! took me 10 attempts to beat them.

and actually on the last attempt i blew up one of my 4 men when i was laying mines lol

BlitzKrieg

CaptainSkidmark wrote: »

for me it must be the time i was playing Hidden and Dangerous 1, the level where you had to lay mines and fend off the germans before you get on the plane. i just rememeber a load of them arriving on in tanks and it was fairly sticky! took me 10 attempts to beat them.

and actually on the last attempt i blew up one of my 4 men when i was laying mines lol

yeah hidden and dangerous 2 had some fantastic tense moments in it and that was one that stuck out.

They did a few levels with the player waiting for a plane or similar.

The best was the seaplane one as the level before it you had been chased across Germany by a number of panthers and tigers and in this level they catch up with you.

What really made it tense though was that there was a genuine time limit, the sequel ruined the hold the line levels by making them trigger based, where once you were ready you radioed in and then the attack started. Made it too easy to abuse the trigger and set everything up without risk and then set the trigger off when you had mined all the opposing start points.


But H+D 1 was cruel and insane with its hold the line levels, you had mere minutes to survey the map and then make your decisions.

MOH

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Operation Flashpoints third mission. You're whole squad is dead leaving you alone in the woods. You have to make your way from wooded area to wooded area while tanks and armoured cars wait outside the wooded areas, soldiers search for you in the woods and a lynx attack helicopter circles overhead ready to blow you to pieces.

That took me hours. Possibly days. But felt great when I finally made it, made me appreciate the lack of quicksave.

5uspect wrote: »

I remember one of the underground labs in STALKER creeping me out.

The bloody music got on my nerves so much I had to take the headphones off. Which just made it worse when things popped out in front of me with no warning.



First Witch I came across in single player Left 4 Dead too. After a few games of MP I just saw her as a nuisance, but playing SP at night and that music starting up and no idea what was coming freaked me out.


Oh and bits of Ravenholm, mainly the start, it wore off after a while. Until I was completely blase about it, not at all bothered at Fr Grigori taking hours to get that cart across to me. And then I saw/heard my first fast zombie and nearly fell off the roof.

A-Trak

1st Resident Evil.
The dogs, the corridor. Screamed like a girl.

doncarlos

A-Trak wrote: »

1st Resident Evil.
The dogs, the corridor. Screamed like a girl.

I can't believe it took four pages before that was posted. Probably the scariest moment in gaming history. The spiders on the ceiling later on the game when your not expecting them were good too.

Still my favourite game of all time.

blaze1

Scariest/Dumbest
After an extended late night session on HL2 I went in to the garden for a smoke, when a cat jumped in the tree.... I proceeded to shat myself thinking it was a head crab and my crowbar was nowhere in sight!!!!!

One of the best

When Ice T was in the studio in GTA San Andrea gave me goosebumps.

shalaska

Rhyme wrote: »

Silent Hill 2, Brookhaven hospital, wandering the dark corridors with the radio spitting odd bits of confusing static, is there an enemy or not? Walking around ready to beat in the head of anything and everything you see. Reach the end of a corridor and there's nothing, you've been a complete pussy for nothing, swing the torch to the right, door handle is broken, turn the left and there's a nurse with her arm above her head ready to attack.

Fell off the bed, controller ended up on a shelf behind the television, didn't play the game for six months.

Goddam i love that game.

truth man,silent hill 2 really was the best!the worst for me was wandering around the prison hearing those squelching footsteps behind me!! tha or the goddamn toilet that banged as you were walking out!

corblimey

Not particularly scary, but I was sweating balls quite recently during the first sniper level in COD4: Modern Warfare and you have to remain perfectly still in the field.

I've played all the others mentioned here, Fatal Frame, Resi, Silent Hill, Eternal Darkness and all those, but since you're expecting the fear in those types of games, it's less of an emotional rollercoaster (although I did resort ot playing Fatal Frame only during day light hours when other people were in teh house )

Greyfox

A-Trak wrote: »

1st Resident Evil.
The dogs, the corridor. Screamed like a girl.

Definitely my all time greatest gaming moment, and still the best game ever!

The introduction to the hunters also scared the sh** outta me and I loved the build up to the end with the alarm, countdown and the final fight with the Tyrant on the roof!

The errie atmosphere just has you on edge throughout the whole game!