Remember way back when game publishers weren’t interested in locking down their intellectual property, and would hand the franchise keys to any porting house that had two ZX Spectrums to rub together? No? Well, this week’s Top 5 does, as we take a look at some of the not-quite-official sequels that were part of gaming’s early years. There’s also a little chat about Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney — Dual Destinies, as well as some vague disappointment about Watch_Dogs being delayed and the resultant lack of enthusiasm in this fall’s next-gen launch lineups — and then we talk about what you’d slap Tom Clancy’s name on AND your favorite cover Pokemon.
Question of the Week
What’s the creepiest thing that’s ever happened to you while playing a game? (It can be part of the game itself, but doesn’t have to be.)
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A recent one I can think of was the first time I saw the kid in Limbo get decapitated because I didn’t know that could happen in the game and it gave me a right jump scare. Honorable mention to the sound the clickers make in The Last of Us because that always freaked me out when I heard it
I have to agree with Chris. That moment in Assassin’s Creed II also creeped the hell out of me, especially since I finished the game at about 3 a.m., with all the lights off. It caught me completely off guard. Since it’s an ending that comes completely out of left field, I was concentrating extra hard on it to figure out what’s going on, when all of a sudden the Sun Lady (Minerva I think was her name) turns and looks directly at the camera. That shit was unsettling.
Silent Hill 2, the whole game. I gave the HD collection a shot, after having put the game down for nearly 10 years, and it still has the power to get under my skin like nothing else. nothing from the current gen has even approached this level of unsettling gameplay. after searching the apartment building near the beginning, overhearing unexplained thumping noises, seeing glimpses of Pyramidhead in inaccessible parts of the building, and feeling completely cut loose from the hand holding I’ve come to expect from current gen games, I felt helpless and entirely lost in the atmosphere.
when will we get another survival horror game that approaches this kind of authentic creepiness?
and Ravenholm
I was playing Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind when suddenly a Dunmer called out to me: “You N’wah!”
Strangely enough, no battle music started playing. No close captions appeared for his battle cry. After much exploring, it turned out there were no NPCs in the area at all. Then, as I was about to get the hell out of the area, I heard it again.
At that point I realized I’d had played the game way too much, was incredibly sleep deprived, and was possibly losing it. That’s the moment I had to get myself to stop playing the damn game.
QotW: The fucking Shalebridge Cradle in Thief: Deadly Shadows.
I can’t really enjoy being terrified, so I don’t play Survival Horror games(never really understood paying money to experience media that makes me feel BAD).
But I loves me some Stealth games, and the Thief series in particular. Unfortunately, halfway through Deadly Shadows you have a mission where you have to sneak around an Orphanage that got turned into an Asylum that then burned down and killed everyone inside.
Everything about this level is terrifying. The ambient sound. And, dear god, the Puppets(the undead asylum patients that were given shock treatements), with their crazy movement and the way they make lights flicker around them.
I think I spent 10 minutes hiding in a fireplace at once point to scared to come out.
QOTW: a couple of things come to mind. First off, when the Chronicles of Riddick first game out for Xbox, I remember the creepy aliens that appear once you descend into the bottom of the mine area scaring the crap out of me, as well as the weird mutants in the sewers right before you get your eye shine and your flashlight is dying. Second, playing “Micheal Myers” in Halo 3 with a group of friends, and whoever was Michael would blare the Halloween theme over their headset so whenever you were near them and he proximity voice kicked in, that’s all you would hear. THAT is far creeper than most horror games I’ve played.
Thanks for the show guys.
As for the QOTW, its not number 1 but when I played MGS2 and was approaching the end, it was about 3 AM and I was slightly delirious from lack of sleep. I was too hyped to beat the game and see the conclusion that I had to go on. Then came the naked Raiden sequence. What follows is Col. Campbell trying to reach you on codec and talking absolute nonsense, that alone was kinda creepy. But then he said what time it was and that I should go to sleep, with his portrait replaced by a flickering skull. I was absolutely unsure what the hell is happening, when he said I should turn off the console or i will regret it, I just fuckin NOPED the hell out of the game and took a walk around the room before retiring to sleep.
Sorry for no climax, it was just incredibly tense for a non survival horror game, strongest emotions are the ones you dont expect I believe.
It’s already been said, but the end of AC2 when Minerva looks straight into your soul. There I was seeing all kinds of sci-fi space stuff and being enamored and suddenly I feel my consciousness being stolen by some shiny rainbow lady.
I don’t really play many survival horror games but I did have a fun/terrifying experience with my dad. I was back from college for Christmas last year and had heard about how intense this game was. I decided it would be fun to hookup my laptop to the home theater my dad had prided himself in building and give Slender a try. My dad walked in as I was setting it up and thought the game sounded interesting. So here we sit, me controlling the helpless girl running through the words, my dad whispering which directions to go. And then noise, a flash of Slenderman, and both of us yelling out in terror. It was a blast, but I didn’t appreciate my dad standing at the end of our near pitch-black hall in a suit later that night.
In Fallout 3 I accidentally stumbled upon the seemingly normal Dunwich Building… how wrong I was. I’m greeted with an audio log that only get progressively more sinister, strange echoes throughout, moving doors and trash, sudden hallucinations and finally a horrific cultist shrine underground. The moment my character appeared as if he was in the present day, met by an office worker only to be a half melted glowing corpse was one of the creepier moments of the whole game, and all by accident. Later I met an NPC who said that building had “bad mojo”. YOU DON’T SAY!?
QOTW: For my birthday i received a bunch of saturn games. Many are the ones that I asked for (panzer, Dragon force, shinobi) but there was one that I did not recognize. It was a black cover with a zombie on it and in red writing ” Resident Evil.” I decided to wait a little bit to play RS, big mistake. As night began to creep in, I popped RS in my saturn and my nightmare began. The beginning of the game was not so bad, until I had to go through the hallway on the right of the main floor. I was slowing creeping along the hallway not knowing what to expect and then BANG, dogs burst through the windows and begin to viciously attack me. I tried to run but I was corner and ended up dying.
That was my first experience with a game that actually gave me a scare.
Back in high school I got introduced to this weird game called Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem. My then boyfriend insisted I had to play it in the dark, at midnight, in the basement of his house, with no lights on. Being fairly adventurous, I took him up on it. Halfway through the game, I was enjoying all of the effects and gags that broke the fourth wall, including the roaches crawling around the screen. I thought it was a great effect, if not a little excessive…until a dark, fat roach fell from the ceiling and landed on my hand. I screamed, then took a moment to collect myself, and got up and walked the fuck away.
(I eventually finished the game, but that relationship didn’t last very long.)
About #Rysefacts.
#1, crunch doesn’t happen all at once. It happens for milestones and then sometimes launch. We’re not talking about a solid block of time.
#2, if these developers have worked hard, then what the fuck is wrong with giving them recognition? Is it BETTER somehow to make them work long hours and then ignore their effort?
It seems to me like most of the negativity was fueled by people who just don’t like Ryse, rather than people who really care about the developers.
Oh, and #3, the fact that Ryse wasn’t looking too hot earlier is WHY there is crunch. These people are working hard to prove the negativity wrong. I don’t think any of them appreciate the acknowledgement of their work being turned into another bit of fuel for the “Let’s hate Ryse” fire, especially since there are probably ZERO launch titles that are not being crunched on at this very moment, and many of them probably have been in crunch for far longer than Ryse.
Things are coming in HOT, because it’s a console launch and devs have made commitments to be READY.
I would be annoyed if it were ANY game that had this sort of thing happen to it, not just because it’s Ryse. And I’m not really thrilled about some devs having to go through huge amounts of crunch time, but I still respect them for doing it.
Why must you be so defensive every time Ryse is mentioned? When i heard this in the podcast, it didn’t sound like they were attacking or hating on Ryse so much as they were simply criticizing the decision of ANY kind of developer proudly boasting about their long periods of Crunch time, as crunch time tends to be viewed unfavorably in the industry in general.
Furthermore, you even had Chris talking about the flipside and saying pretty much what you said here. They also acknowledged that the game seem to be looking better and being previewed better. So why the need to act so defensive about it?
I’m not attacking the podcast crew. I’m talking about why I didn’t like the general dumb outrage when the #rysefacts thing happened, dude.
QOTW: The boss fight with The End in MGS3, despite all the creepy characters and forth wall breaking moments that is the only thing that’s really gotten to me. For whatever reason every time I played through the game I had to take a break at that moment, it was probably the knowledge that he can die of old age if you take too long to return to the game and Paramedic’s ominous warnings when you save that planted the seed. I played games in my bedroom at the time, and was well aware that this mechanic worked by using the PS2 internal clock.
Still, whenever I went to bed the idea that, in a way, he was still in there, waiting for me, freaked me the hell out. Is he waiting in the same spot? Is the clock ticking away right now? In a manner of speaking isn’t he right behind me, in the box beneath the TV?! I lost sleep on more than one occasion and at one point had to get up and remove the disk from the machine for peace of mind.
Probably the stupidest thing ever, being scared of an imaginary old man on a disk and taking it out “to be sure” but then fear and anxiety don’t exactly operate on logic. Needless to say the new always listening Kinect is my Silent Hill style personal hell.
QOTW: Fatal Frame came out pretty much at the ideal time to scare the shit out of me: As a teenager old enough to ant to play Horror games, but still enough of a hormone filled wuss to be very affected by them. The game had plenty of jump scares of course, but what stood out was just the chilling atmosphere that the game had in general. A mostly calm, serene looking Japanese mansion further enhanced the uneasiness that at any moment a haunted soul could materialize virtually at any moment and from any place.
And yet… What is probably the time I’ve been scared the most wasn’t actually caused by the game, but by my older brother who knew I was playing the game at night time for the most part and with my door close. One night, he left the door of the room slightly ajar without me noticing, and while I was navigating a particularly creepy Ritual mask filled room, motherfucker burst trough the door and snarled at me, making me squeal like a girl and making me drop the controller… His controller. Fucking thing didn’t break though, otherwise it might have served as payback for pulling that prank on me.
That bone whale in Bubble Bobble! Fright incarnate.
But seriously.. back when the 360 was a young thing and I was a young, dumb thing, I dropped 3 hits of LSD and decided to give the Prey demo a try. Now I had never done acid before and I wasn’t sure what was about to happen. By the time aliens ripped the roof off and stole away my loved ones, I was tripping DRAGONballs. Aboard their ship I was terrified, and a little surprised that the aliens too were listening to The Mars Volta (…yeah). Unaware that I was standing up, my face inches from the television, I was completely immersed. I was Turok the dinosa…ALIEN hunter and I was going to get my girlfriend back!!!!
In September of 2001 I ended a year-long relationship with a depressive and self-destructive girl named Adi. She was a good person at times and I felt horrible for finally leaving her, but I just couldn’t take it anymore. And then Silent Hill 2 came out… The feelings of loss, guilt, and isolation hit me so goddamned hard that I actually considered getting back together with Adi (and somehow “saving” both of us.) Here’s the creepy part:
A few months after I broke up with Adi and things calmed down, a girl that closely resembled her started coming to the video store I worked at. We chatted a bit, and she was really cool and sweet… In fact, the girl was like a younger, nicer, cuter version of Adi. Her name? Adina. Like fucking Mary/Maria in Silent Hill 2… It was just too weird for me, and definitely informed my decision to not pursue further contact. Such a bizarre period in my life, and partly due to fuckin vidjagames
My creepiest moment in a game was when I played the first Uncharted and the moment where you end up in some sort of factory or a boat (I haven’t played it in ages) and you had to fend off these creepy alien/zombie things while trying to escape and it was the most creepiest and the most painfully hard gaming experience of my life that I never got past that part.
QOTW: Therr were a bunch in Dead Space, Dead Space 2, and Last Of Us but if I had to pick one I would have to go with the entire opening bit of Bioshock where you’re being stalked by the Spider Splicer. You see her brutally eviscerate that terrified guy with a gun and then immediately turn to you then somehow vanish repeatedly. You have no means of defense until you eventually get the wrench and even then the last thing I wanted to do was get close to that thing.
For me it was when me and my brothers were playing Chrono Trigger for the first time. We’d stayed up late because we were trying to beat Lavos, got really far, and died. It was like 1am and since we’d been playing virtually all day (changing out to eat or relieve cramped hands) when “And the world refused to change…” popped up on the all black screen after we died, we were too creeped out to continue. It took us almost two days to get back to the game and less than two hours to beat it twice after that. *new game plus* It really shouldn’t have gotten to us so badly but the light in the room was burning out and the tv was beside a large bank of windows facing the woods, in which we’d seen lynx less than 3 days before.
Omigod….you guys have butchered all that is pokemon pronunciation
1000 face palms.
I have enjoyed quite a few creepy moments in my videogaming life (RE, Silent Hill, Thief) but the one that really stands out for me is this moment from D
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJkFp7VvkFc – start at 2:25
Watching it now still gives me a slight chill. Playing it as a 16 y/o in my parents cold basement with all the lights out and the volume up significantly added to the creep factor. On a related note, RIP Kenji Eno. You are missed.
Oh yeah, one for the road – ALL of Seaman 🙂
OH SHIT I forgot about the clancy question
It reminded me of this Tom Clancy’s : The Last Clancy poster I made a couple years ago as a joke with a friend
http://scontent-a-ord.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash2/527868_10150632403257799_1036715712_n.jpg
QOTW:
I apologize in that this isn’t video games related, BUT HAVE FAITH THIS IS SCARY AS SHIT (or at least I thought this was).
This happened to one of my college friends best high school friend back in her home town (I have no reason to believe any of this is made-up).
So there was this only child girl who lived in a very nice upper middle class/upper class area of Minnesota, and her parents had left for several days leaving her alone in her house. Like I said this was a very nice suburb in Minnesota which meant that this girl was relatively sheltered and understandably a bit nervous as, despite her being 17 it was the first time she had been home alone for multiple days.
Her parents had left late the night before and this was now the evening of her second day alone. While watching a movie, she heard a curious clanking sound coming from the basement (this is a very large house so noise carries) but paid it no mind as it was probably the heater or something kicking in.
The clanking sound returned, this time a little louder. As you all know your mind is your own worse enemy, and this girl, alone for first time, started to become a little scared at this sound, so she started skyping my friend to have some human comfort.
Into the night now, the clanking sound continued, three repetitive clanks, then a long pause, then three more. While the girl assured herself it was most likely some part of the house, it had by now considerably unnerved. She started to go check out finally what the annoying sound was but stopped at the doorway at the top of the stairs leading down into the basement. Probably her sheltered, overactive imagination but something inside her just said ‘no’ to the idea of going down there.
So she called the cops, not in a panicky state but just asking if they were around her area tonight if they wouldn’t mind dropping by. She explained that it was her first time home alone and she was admittedly a bit scared and told the responded of the clanging sound coming from the basement.
She hung up and went back to the living room. IMMEDIATELY as she did she heard a siren, and moments later a police cruiser came screaming into her driveway, followed by furious pounding on her front door. Quickly opening the door, two male policemen, both with their hands on their still holstered but uncovered pistols brushed past and located the basement door her while a third female cop walked up to her.
Bewildered, the girl asked what was going on as (at this point more worried that she had accidentally called upon the police like an actual emergency than anything else). As the two policemen proceed down the stairs the female cop told her that after she hung up her phone with the responded the line had stayed open for several seconds longer, before a second ‘click’ ended the call.
Returning from the basement moments later, were the two policemen, and in between them another man. Shortly after upon investigation it became apparent that the clanging sound had been this man, (who had seen the girls facebook status that in some way implied she would be home alone for this night) methodically hitting the basement boiler with an aluminum baseball bay, as to convince the girl that something was wrong with the heater and get her to come down and investigate the noise.
The girl then had a friend come stay the night with her sleping in the living room and they all lived happily ever after except the girl who was so traumatized she had to go to therapy and I have no idea what happened to the guy they found camped out in her basement.
Idk but for me the combination of a person inside your house for HOURS, waiting, is so much more terrifying than breaking in, along with the whole ‘the call is coming from inside the house’ deal the whole thing just scares the crap out of me, even when writing it.
haha WOW, THANKS GUYS! 😀
oh, and…
QOTW: Itchy. Tasty.
LEGEND OF ZELDA: I got chills every times that dedodedodedodedodedo music would come on when you encounter those spiders in Legend of Zelda games. And then that swishing sound when the spiders repelled down. YEEEESH!!!
In my youth my first fps was Metroid prime so my first play through was interesting to say the least. There were two points that completely messed with me, the intro to the Chozo ghosts… and the dark fuggin space pirate base, in Phendrana Drifts. Trying to get to that damn Thermal Visor, and encountering so many new enemy types, drones, stealth pirates, and METROIDS…. and in the dark. Just thinking back to those moments still send shivers up my spine.
QOTW: This happened to me while playing the Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I had gotten the game the same day as my Wii, so I decided to go right in and play. Sure the game was beautiful for the time, and it really felt mature, but then I got to the desert dungeon. In this dungeon, the skeletons would pop out of the sand in droves, trying to stab me to death. And those screaming zombies sounded like a nightmare come true. After escaping into another room, I couldn’t see any enemies around. However, my body suddenly became sluggish, and I couldn’t make the jump to the next platform. Activating the special vision, I saw Link was covered in INVISIBLE GHOST RATS!!! This freaked me out so much the Wii mote came flying from my hands (always wear the strap kids) where it would hit the light switch. There I was, in a dark room looking at Link covered in ghost rats. I still have never beaten Twilight Princess.