Top 8 freakiest game moments

Tuesday, January 17, 2006 » gaming list thought

I decided a couple weeks ago I'd do my 5 Games in 2005 list in February, since I'm wrapping up Resident Evil 4 and would like to give Shadow of the Colossus a shot at the running. So, in the meantime, here's this list. (The number 8 is not really significant.)

#8 - Silent Hill - The first skinned corpse
Not as sudden as a lot of the other moments on this list, but still pretty jarring. When you wander down that dark alley at the very beginning of the game, probably the last thing you expect to find is a flayed body strung up on a fence. This really raised the bar in an unexpected direction for the genre, and hinted at what laid ahead for the then-fledgeling Silent Hill series. Not to be outdone by Resident Evil, they came up with...

#7 - Silent Hill - The empty locker psyche-out
A great, elaborately contrived throw-away shock. A cat jumps out of the rattling cubby locker the first time, and it's scary. So when you come back to the same room later—only this time, it's in the alternate evil universe—you know something horrible is going to fly at you from that same rattling locker. Except it's empty. Then, as you leave, a corpse tumbles out of a different locker. EEE. For me, this was the reigning shock king until...

#6 - Silent Hill 3 - The funhouse corpse
Pretty gratuitous and not especially groundbreaking, although it's probably the closest I've come to having an actual heart attack while playing one of these games. I won't give this one away. Instead, we'll switch series over to...

#5 - Fatal Frame - The voice
Not an hour into the game there's an empty room with some sort of low, rumbling noise. Upon further investigation, it turns out to be an incoherent tape recording of the deepest voice ever. It's hard to convey how incredibly freaky it is to hear, but just know that I stopped playing this game at about that point. Capcom nicely exploits this deep voice freakiness with Resident Evil 4's monks' incessant chanting. After about 20 minutes of morir es vivirrr, I would have welcomed a...

#4 - Resident Evil - Dog through the window
The original shocker and probably the defining moment of the entire genre. Anything that's jumped through a window or mirror since then has just been a pale imitator. This also gets bonus points for being just as freaky and unexpected when it happens again 10 seconds later. Still, it doesn't have the same visual shock as...

#3 - Resident Evil 4 - Leon loses his head
RE4 is almost Space Quest-ian in the attention devoted to the special death cutscenes (and there are a lot of them, too). When a chainsaw-wielding villager ran at me, though, I really didn't expect him to just straight-up slice poor Leon S. Kennedy's head off. And I really didn't expect them to show the whole thing. So graphic, but not as psychologically traumatic as...

#2 - Silent Hill 4 - Jasper Gein's self-immolation
A lot of people met with gruesome ends in The Room, but none were as memorable as Jasper, the possibly-retarded man you meet and later discover ablaze and carved up with a serial number, all the while rambling on about the devil. Silent Hill 4 turned out to be one seriously messed up game. But even that doesn't hold a candle to the #1 on the list...

#1 - Mega Man series - jumping over spikes and pits
After watching Morgan play Mega Man IV for an hour or so yesterday, I had to add this last item because not even Resident Evil's hunters produce the same amount of tension that I get watching the little blue guy just barely clear one vicious-looking spike after another.

OK, I guess Mega Man games don't really fall into the survival horror category. I can only hypothesize that those gigantic caltrop sequences were what originally inspired Shinji Mikami, though.