Best Australian Nintendo DS Community, News, Games, Videos, Competitions, and Forums. Mario Galaxy, Metroid and More!
Blogs \ Top 5: Games That Made You Scream!
Compiled by Ben Salter
No, I’m not talking about games that were so bad you exploded in a fit of murderous rage (see Superman 64). I’m talking about games that were actually scary; games nobody in their right mind would want to play alone on a dark stormy night.
I’m sure there are heaps of others out there. Unfortunately, I don’t get to play as many PC games as I do console, so no doubt this is a relatively untapped medium for me. As such, post any of your scariest games below!
5. Dead Space
Platforms: Xbox 360, PS3, PC
Release: 2008
Dead Space is the most recent game on my freak out list. It takes the best of the survival horror genre, throws you aboard a giant spaceship infested with a bunch of monsters that have a thing eating your face, and creates an extremely tense atmosphere.
I expect some people to yell (or type loudly) “weak”, but play through Dead Space on a lonely winter’s night and you’ll see what I mean. Its relentless scare tactics have you on the edge of your seat until the very end, making it one of the scariest games released this generation.
4. F.E.A.R.
Platforms: Windows PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3
Original Release: 2005
At first glance, name aside, F.E.A.R. doesn’t appear to be all that frighten. It seems to be a stock standard FPS, and you can’t be scared in a game where you can let the bullets fly, right? Wrong! Apart from the fact enemies are near impossible to defeat on the hardest difficulty, you’ll soon discover that F.E.A.R. is an FPS if with an extreme horror twist.
The game designers have said F.E.A.R. was inspired by Japanese horror, and that they wanted the atmosphere to get under the player’s skin. The central scare tactics are focused around a little dead girl, who’s far too lively to be dead for my liking. The whole thing has a “The Ring” feel to it, and I for one will take a giant fire breathing monster over a freaky undead girl any day of the week.
3. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
Platforms: GameCube
Original Release: 2002
Any game that tries to trick you into believing you’ve deleted your own save file means trouble. Eternal Darkness is another one of those games that tries to scare the living daylights out of you by getting into your head. In fact, it came complete with a sanity meter that measured the mental state of the protagonists onscreen. You could actually watch, almost helplessly, as your onscreen avatars took another step towards insanity.
The sanity effect had you (or your characters) hearing things that weren’t really there; they saw things like the walls bleeding and all of a sudden the volume would drop and a fake television volume indicator suggested everything was fine. Then, of course, the game pretended to delete your save file. Nintendo liked the idea so much that they actually went out and patented videogame insanity, and have recently renewed their patent for Eternal Darkness.
2. Resident Evil
Platforms: PlayStation, GameCube, Wii, PC, DS
Original Release: 1996
In a top 5 list of the scariest games of all time at least one Resident Evil game had to be here. Compared to some more recent titles perhaps it isn’t as pants soilingly scary as it once was, (perhaps it’s because I’m an RE fanboy) but it’s the series that started the horror craze, and deserves a spot in the list.
When I reviewed the Wii port of the GameCube remake I criticized the game’s poor controls and terrible camera angles. Today we expect survival horror games to scare us in a range of diverse and interesting ways that don’t impact too heavily on the gameplay experience. However, back when Resident Evil was released these things are what made the game so intensely frightening. You often had no idea what you were walking into, and when you finally released the clumsy controls often made it impossible to escape. Furthermore, Resident Evil gave everyone a temporary phobia of jumping dogs. The second you heard the sound of a zombie dog preparing to pounce you knew it was all over.
1. Silent Hill 2
Platforms: PlayStation 2, Xbox, PC
Original Release: 2001
I can’t quite put my finger on one specific aspect, but Silent Hill 2 is the scariest game I can remember playing. Its relentless psychological scare tactics have you almost crying for mercy. Like Resident Evil the Silent Hill series is largely responsible for the success of the survival horror genre today.
Silent Hill 2 had an extremely engaging plot for a horror game. You wanted to find out what would happen next, but most of the time you were too fixated on surviving to pay it the attention it deserved. Horror games are all about atmosphere, and Silent Hill 2 had a great one. Like most of the other games I’ve mentioned, it’s mostly psychological; there’s nothing scary about about 100 enemies on screen, it’s all about the unknown.
Notable Mentions
- Silent Hill (1999 / PS1)
- System Shock 2 (1999 / PC)
- Doom 3 (2004 /PC/Xbox)
Tags:
360
Darkness
Dead
Eternal
Evil
FEAR
GameCube
Hill
ICC
PC
PS1
PS2
ps3
Resident
Silent
Space
Top5
xbox
Submitted by ICC_06
08/03/2010
38
Join MyDS to vote for your favourite story!
Comments
Kudos: 23,250
Mates: 144
I was expecting RE5 to give me nightmares but I was sadly mistaken.
I could use a good scare, something to keep me at the edge of my seat.
10/03/2010
Pokemon Heart Gold / Soul Silver
[California, U.S |MyDS, MyWii, MyPS3, MyFrag]
Kudos: 3,472
Mates: 59
Only played RE in that list. Played it both on PS1 and Wii. Both freaked the heck out of me. Great game though, love it!
=D
09/03/2010
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
OBJECTION!
Kudos: 6,600
Mates: 230
Awesome list. I havnt played any horror games, because most of them are MA :/
09/03/2010
Pokemon Pearl
████████████████████████████████████