The D-Pad Chronicles #1: Horror Games

The D-Pad Chronicles #1: Horror Games

Here's something weird about me, I love Horror games, LOVE EM!!!! Can't get enough of them everything from Silent Hill to Resident Evil to Killer7 to Eternal Darkness, but the thing is although I play and beat many horror games, I can't watch Horror movies, much to the dismay of my horror-loving friends. For 21 years I've managed to evade them everywhere I go but of course I make up for this with my undying love for Horror games. This doesn't really have anything to do with this article I just though it'd make a good intro.

Anyway in my year of Horror game patronage I thought I'd share some of the best/freakiest experiences in such games, 10 to be exact

WARNING: MILD SPOILERS!! but only of the scares, no massive story spoilers


The Best 5 Shock Moments
You know these babies, the cheapest and easiest scares to get in a game, usually appear during a supposevely calm moment, a massive blast of sound, a visual shock, a rumble of the control pad and suddenly you need to change your pants, not that I've ever had to by the way, to be honest I don't know anybody who has.

Condemned, 360
This moment actually had a lot of build up, I was in an abandoned school trying to find a man being perused by a killer called 'The Torturer' who tortured his victims, let them lose, hunted them down and drove them to suicide. I'd found the victim's severed lips (!!!) in a classroom and his severed arm tied to a basketball hoop so I assumed the guy is dead. I finally find him in a locker, arm missing, lips gone, teeth exposed and so I start the process of taking photos of the evidence, my analyst tells me she needs a close up of his face so I do what I've done about 5 times earlier in the game and zoom in then he GRABS MY ARM and painfully moans "help me" turns out he's not dead but in a shitload of pain, let me tell you it's damn freaky seeing a guy with no lips trying to talk to you.

Eternal Darkness, GC
For those of you who haven't played it, Eternal Darkness is based around a book that is being read by a woman (Alex) about people in different time periods trying to prevent an evil force enslaving humanity, the game has something called a Sanity Meter, the more enemies you encounter the more Sanity you lose, you get sanity back by killing them. The less sanity you have, the more the game screws with you. Things like audio problems, the blue screen of death, blood dripping from the walls and an invisible enemy 'killing' you. This game was reliant of creepy scares rather then shocks, but there was one single moment in the game that had a shock moment. I was playing as Alex and was searching for another chapter of the book to continue reading it, I was in a guest room ensuite and saw that the bathtub was full of blood, unlike earlier, so I checked it out and suddenly I was flashed an image of Alex in the tub, dead, accompanied by a loud-as-hell scream. The scare from this is because I never expected it, plus it was late dusk outside, just like in the game.

Resident Evil 2, N64
The first two of many shocks in the first true horror game I ever played. I was walking though a hallway in the police station that I'd already walked though many time when out of nowhere a bunch of zombie hands burst though one of the boarded up windows, while running/recovering I passed another window and even more came through, the volume of the crashes definitely added to the effect. This happened again after doing some stuff in a interrogation room, you know the one with those 2 way mirrors (or Magic Mirror as they call it in the game) I'd been in the other room and was totally sure nobody was hiding in it so I went into the room where the mirror is one-way and sure enough CRASH a friggin' dog smashed though the damn mirror. When I think if RE2 those two moments always come to mind

Half-Life, PC[/p]
A classic, crawling through a vent in the 'Office Complex' chapter and suddenly out of nowhere a Headcrab jumped out from the shadows in front of me, with it's trademark screech, although it was one of the only shock moments in HL, I've never crawled though vents the same since then.

The Suffering
While it's pretty hard to get me to stop playing a game because it's too scary, this is one game that made me quit (only because it was night). Throughout the game at totally random points weird images flash up on the screen with a disturbing noise that sounded like a church bell. A simple yet effective scare and I've heard on the grapevine that this trick is also used in F.E.A.R.


Best 5 Creepy moments
Yeah any two dollar game programmers can make a Shock moment, flash something up and call it a horror game, but it takes a true genius to make Creepy moments, moments that cause you to be sick in the stomach and to constantly tell yourself over and over "It's only a game, it's only a game, OMGOMGOMG where's the power button!!!"

Silent Hill 4, PS2
While watching the well done opening movie clip before the title screen, at the end you hear a soft chanting monk-style chorus of humming, it was a nice contrast to the actual footage beforehand and I liked it, I even downloaded it (and used it in my Halloween Flash ID), then it went sour. I didn't hear that music till the very end of the game, the final backtrack to room 302, through the other-world apartment blocks, where the walls look like that are infested with maggots and undefeatable enemies are everywhere, this moment unnerved me more than any RE shock moment could ever do, now you know why I mentioned 'sick in the stomach' earlier. This calm music I used to find relaxing was playing and I didn't know what was going to happen next.

Silent Hill 4, PS2(again)
At about the halfway point (where it starts to get hard) you're in a hospital, you find a long corridor with about 12 doors, each one leads to one of 12 random rooms, each time it's different, each with it's own little creepy thing, most of them are pretty tepid, until one room! I walk in and the camera is at the back of the room looking at me, I walk forward and the camera moves to show what's at the end of the room, A HUGE HUMAN HEAD, about as big as the room itself, partially deformed, and moaning. I was literally frozen in fear, finally I ran straight out, hoping I didn't miss any items. Who the hell thought of that!??!

Half-Life
Yet another late night of Half-Life, noclip-ing my way though the levels of Xen to reach the end of the game, at last I made it, then what happens? I'm face to face with the gaping maw of The Nihilanth, a massive.... thing, huge head, little body, a very disturbing image to fade into. Normally you fall down first then look up at the beast, but me being the honest-to-god cheater that I am, I fell nowhere. Call it karma if you will.


Resident Evil 1, GC
This was the ultimate Capcom bitch-slap, for 4 games it was all "kill the zombie and all your troubles will end" but in the GC remake of the first game they threw in a little something, something, to make life a lotta bit harder. If you kill a zombie, sure it falls to the ground and doesn't move, but give it half an hour and BAM, say goodbye to your jugular vein as the zombie comes back to like, with claws and lightning quick speed. The only way to prevent this is to burn the zombie once you kill it, but this is pretty hard cornering there is next to no much needed gasoline in this game, the creepiness comes from the fact that you never know when a zombie will come alive.

Silent Hill 1, PSX
During one of your frequent trips to the other-world you run into Lisa the nurse, who is pretty much the only human you meet in this place, during the game she seems very stressed and you seem to be her only relief, but towards the end of the game she ends up like the other zombie nurses, you even begin to witness her transformation, well at least the start of it and I found it genuinely disturbing to see such a nice character come to such a gristly end, oh Konami you're so cruel!


worst moments
Not every scare moment in a game is necessarily a hit, in fact quite a few games drop the ball when it comes to a genuine scare and just come off as being really tryhard and really annoying, here are some of the worst offenders


Eternal Darkness, GC
Earlier I mentioned a few of this game's sanity effects, one of the effects is the room is turned upside down, eventually, like always the screen flashes white and you return to normal control. This is neither scary or funny, it's simply a waste of time "ok I get it, I'm going insane and the room is upside down, oooohhh no I'm on the ceiling, now can I get back to the game at some point?"

Condemned, 360
Towards the end of the game you're in an old house in a vineyard, you have to search for clues, you need to use that fancy blue light they use in CSI to follow a path to different clues. One of the paths leads to an enemy infested basement, who seem to appear at random times, also you can't have a weapon and a forensic tool out at the same time, so it's a real pain in the ass when you're trying to follow a path of odd writing and end up being shocked by some random zombie like attacker, quite annoying!

Resident Evil, PSX
Anybody who's played the original Resident Evil will remember this little piece of nostalgia, the opening scene of the game was in live action and looks like it was shot on a two dollar sound stage, the acting was so bad I think I got some incurable disease from it. It's so bad that it's funny and that's not exactly the right tone for a RE game, good thing Capcom fixed this up quick smart in the GC remake.

Rainbow Six, N64
I know this isn't a horror game but it contains a pisspoor effort to scare you, whenever you open most doors in the game you get a sudden orchestra hit noise as if something is about to come out at you. It'd be fine if this was in every door with a person in it, but this is every door you open, annoying and stupid!

Goosebumps: Escape from Horrorland, PC
I'm sure next to nobody has played this so I'll have to do a little explaining. This game is sort of a sequel to the original Goosebumps book 'A night a Horrorland' you end up stuck in the evil amusement park and have to find a way out, it's a long game but a lot of fun, but one part is by far the most difficult and annoying. You can enter trash cans and end up in a maze where you have to collect gold coins, these are also found throughout the park and determine what ending you get. The catch is that you have stupid tentacle, multi teethed, lightning fast, bug eyed monsters that wander around in random paths, here you are collecting many many coins and suddenly a badly rendered monster appears, one red screen and loud poorly-sampled sound effect later, your back outside with none of the coins you just spent the best part of 10 mins collecting. This is so hard that I've found NO faqs at all about it!


Top 5 Horror Games
Finally here we have in my opinion, the top 5 horror games I've played and why.

5. Resident Evil, GC
Crimson head Zombies, scary interiors and severely souped up graphics and sound, the is one scary game

4. Doom 3, X-box
You fight your way alone through a research facility on mars, with enemies from hell jumping out at you from every dark corner, showing no mercy, you are alone nearly the whole time and have to fight through Hell itself, no FPS has ever been more terrifying

3. Killer7, GC
This game is stacked wall to wall with the things that used to freak me out big time as a child, sudden Maniacal laughter, the feeling a being alone in a strange world, the severed heads of characters after they die and weird stories that I didn't understand at all, truly a work of art!

2. Resident Evil 4, GC
C'mon, a village full of angry, psychopathic Europeans, how can you not be scared?

1. Silent Hill 4
The scariest game ever, HANDS DOWN, the judges decision is final, no correspondence will be entered into. Consistent enemies that can't be killed, a haunted apartment and a good looking chick gets painfully mutilated, the only game that has made me feel "sick in the stomach", this is the stuff nightmares are made of!


Well that's it, remove the pillow from your face and turn the lights back on, the horror is over..... for now! With a massive onslaught of next gen horror games on the horizon, I'm sure horror gamers such as myself will be very happy for years to come (can't wait for Dead Rising!). Also I'm sure some of you are saying "what about Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2" well I haven't played that far through SH2 to truly experience the horror of this guy/thing and to the rest of you saying "aaah these 'scary moments' are nothing, you're a wuss" well try telling me that after you've experienced a horror game the proper way, late night, lights off and volume up!

Anybody else got a horror game moment to share? stick it in the comments and if it's good enough I'll put it in here.