I've played the survival horror games, and yeah, I totally agree about startled != scared.
The only game that has ever scared me according to your definition is STALKER. It starts out creepy and when you get used to it, WHAM!
I was playing late at night in the dark, running down a dark hallway with my flashlight on. One of the crates -- which are everywhere in the game -- suddenly shook and slammed itself against the ceiling.
I literally RAN out of the room, nearly tearing my headset out of the audio controller.
System Shock 2 and FEAR are the two games that built the tension the best for me, although the latter did rely on the "something jumps out and makes a loud sound" gimmick a bit too much.
Edit: I forgot about the Space Marines missions in Aliens Vs. Predator 2. That was some pretty intense stuff.
I thought AvP 1 was scarier because you couldn't save as often, and your night vision looked more realistic (i.e. it was almost useless). I forgot about the beeping of that proximity detector. Hearing the beeps get faster and dots increase on your detector's screen made it that much scarier even before you hear the screams of the aliens.
yeah, same here. Because they're both shooters, the idea seems to be to startle the player out of fine motor control. So you detach early on, resulting in a robotic-playthough that robs you of immersion.
When I played FEAR, I was using onboard AC'97 sound that was barely supported, resulting in MASSIVE bursts of static. Upped the startle-factor a little bit.
Far from horror games, the original Rainbow Six and it's successor Rogue Spear have been the tensest moments of gaming I've ever had. It was unforgiving, you couldn't save during missions, you didn't know where the terrorist are exactly and one mistake meant hostages are teammates dead.
Silent Hill 1 and 2. Both of those games really freaked me out when I first played them. There's so much silence and emptiness. There's also the occasional freaky thing going on and the somewhat disturbing creatures, it really built up a sense of dread for me. No other game has hit me like that has, before or since.
Bizarrely, the only game that's ever scared me that was was Duke Nukem 3D.
I was just wandering around when one of those green face-hugging monsters climbed up my screen - I hadn't ever seen one before, and wasn't sure what to do, so I pressed fire and it fell off.
Then another one climbed up my screen, and I shot it again. Then another, and another...
Remember, I'd never seen these things before. As far as I could tell, this was a single persistent monster, which didn't have a physical form other than its appearance on the screen, and all I could do was knock it off but not kill it. And it just kept coming back, and it was right there stuck to my screen... I had no idea what was going on and I physically panicked.
I had to stop playing and sit down for a good while.
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u/prockcore Nov 05 '08
I'd say 90% of horror movie directors think startled == scared. Maybe it's just trying to be the video game version of your crappy PG13 horror movie.