Are there any games that play with your phobias?

[Geoffrey Taucer]

For me, Jabu-Jabu's insides was pretty unnerving my first time around - all that pixelated organic shit, hard-as-shit puzzles with that not-entirely-un-creepy fish girl who's too spoiled to walk anywhere (except for INTO A BIG BLOODY RED HOLE IN THE FLOOR!!), giant pulsating invincible tentacles that swing at your face, big cube sponges thrashing around for no apparent reason... and on top of all that, everything you attack either bleeds or electrocutes you. Epic boss though, felt so good to conquer that place =D

Actually, I liked Jabu-Jabu, but that was mainly because I had a major hard-on for Ruto.

Shut up. I was 11.

ANYWAY, Metroid Prime 3 was the first metroid game I played, and the metroids really creeped me out until I got used to them. And that was just last year.

[Gollgagh]

A lot of things in King's Quest VI creeped me out, like the genie who kept showing up trying to get you to inadvertently kill yourself. He could always be identified by his glittering eyes. The zombies in the land of the dead were freaky too. If you touched them you would disintegrate, but because you had a goddamn adventure game point-and-click interface, it was impossible to guarantee that you wouldn't brush against them. So every move was nerve-wracking.

Speaking of Sierra adventure games, all the people dying in Laura Bow II creeped me right the fuck out when I was, what, 4?

especially the methods that they had been killed

[friendlyHunter]

'Nohbody', you reminded me of another moment that creeped me out. 3 guesses what and the first two don't count.

Can I guess??? =D

A lot of things in Zelda:OOT creeped me out, like the owl who kept showing up trying to get you to inadvertently adventure. He could always be identified by his spinning head. The zombies in the land of the future were freaky too. If you touched them they would hump you, but because you had a goddamn N64 game 3rd person camera, it was impossible to guarantee that you wouldn't brush against them.

Fiiiiixed.

And anyone who's scared of Metroids needs to play Metroid Zero Mission on hard mode. Those babies stay frozen for about one second, and they almost always come in groups. I simply love the low-item runs where missing once can get you killed ^__^

Also I need to acquire Silent Hill.

[Bleck]

Any game that involves me going under water.

[LuckyXIII]

I take it you are too young to have played Super Mario Brothers 3, which is why you don't know A) the name of that fish and how much more frightening he was in that game.

So young.... so innocent...

HOLY COW!! Yeah, in world 3...3-3? With the level going up and down, and then the Big Berthas would leap out and EAT you... From then on I would always warp past world 3 altogether because Big Bertha froke me the eff out.

[Bleck]

From then on I would always warp past world 3 altogether

this right here, same deal for me

[friendlyHunter]

From then on I would always warp past world 3 altogether because Big Bertah froke me the eff out.

Can... can I sig this??

[Overflow]

An older game by Epic Megagames...Makers of Jazz Jackrabbit and I believe the Unreal games.

It was a point-and-click game about a boy's dreams called Dare to Dream. The game starts out with the standard lullaby theme, then shows the title:

That monster face scared me when I was about 7 or 8.

Anyways, the game takes place inside the dreams of this messed up kid, and there's two things in particular that freaked me out: Near the end of the first episode there is a panoramic view of hundreds of impaled people on large stakes in a blue field. The stakes and people are silhouetted, but there are bright red stains at the base of each.

The other is that throughout the game, everyone is telling you to wake up quickly or else "the monster will get you." Mind you I played this during the time that I still had nightmares about monsters under the bed. When you finally wake up from the dream, you see the kid sit up in bed and a pair of red eyes under the bed. WHat made it worse though is that that night, my little sister made a pair of cut out, glow in the dark eyes and put them under my bed, then jokingly told me to check before I went to sleep. I flipped. Big time.

More info on the game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dare_to_Dream

[Zephyr]

I'd already played the other metroid games and I'd never really been scared of metroids, but I jumped when one came screaming through the walls at me in Prime 3. It was a little creepy when you let them out by taking the power-cell and they're all zooming around underneath you...

[friendlyHunter]

IMO that was the weakest metroid encounter ever for me; it all seemed so scripted. The darkness didn't mean a thing because everything there was glow-in-the-dark for some reason, and the metroids themselves were extremely dumb and not at all aggressive. When they DID attack, they drained about 2 damage per second... You'd think metroids that can temporarily phase out of existence would be nightmare fuel, not another boring "wait & shoot" pattern. On top of that it was all like "arrr this is supposed to be scary!!" The melty guy in the first doorway gave me a jump though.

And I will admit that [spoilers] I had a slight "holy sh**" moment when the metroids started flying out into the sky, but I soon remembered "the script of this entire game sucks, and those metroids will probably never be seen or mentioned again".

But holy cow Overflow.... wow

[LuckyXIII]

Can... can I sig this??

Sure. I've never had a quote sigged before...I also edited the original post b/c apparently I can't properly spell a word if I use it more than once in the same post...

[Bleck]

MP3 didn't freak me out as much as MP2, especially MP2's dark world. There was just something unsettling about being in a place where the air hurts you - add onto that the fact that you've also got horrible mutated creatures attacking you from places that, a lot of the time, you can't even see and yeah. It gets pretty frantic.

[DjSammyG]

so the dopefish gave me nightmares.

*burp*

[reelmojo]

I am utterly amazed at how many people are terrified by Zelda 64.

[Gollgagh]

so the dopefish gave me nightmares.

*burp*

once more for posterity

[Amayirot Akago]

A lot of things in King's Quest VI creeped me out, like the genie who kept showing up trying to get you to inadvertently kill yourself. He could always be identified by his glittering eyes. The zombies in the land of the dead were freaky too. If you touched them you would disintegrate, but because you had a goddamn adventure game point-and-click interface, it was impossible to guarantee that you wouldn't brush against them. So every move was nerve-wracking.

No mention of the Lord of the Dead's Non-Standard Game Over? None at all? Oh, the HORROR.

I also regularly avoid playing any first person games with any manner of face-clinging creatures. Duke 3D, Blood 2, AvP... Thank God Half-Life hasn't done this... yet.

[friendlyHunter]

I also regularly avoid playing any first person games with any manner of face-clinging creatures. Duke 3D, Blood 2, AvP... Thank God Half-Life hasn't done this... yet.

A game that's about crabs that cling to people's faces doesn't have any creatures that cling to your face? I haven't played more than the HL2 demo (and I'm awaiting fixing that), but this strikes me as odd for some reason. =/

Haha, we just have to wait for the 3D-glasses version of HL2, where they'll program Stalkers to stick their legs at your face and shoot debris into your face.

[Zephyr]

Just started HL2 today... headcrabs... ugh...

I think what scares me more than headcrabs though are those weird things on the ceiling with long tongues. They're ALWAYS in dark places, out of sight, with their little tongues hanging down to get you! AH!

[Siamey]

Not really a phobia, but to this day I can't play through Act 2 of Sandopolis Zone without breaking into a cold sweat and having goosebumps and just being fucking on edge the whole time.

More often than not I will end up turning off the genesis before I get to the end of the zone. Something about the music plus those ghosts that follow you and get bigger and Bigger and BIGGER and you can't find the lightswitch and you're trapped in a hole that is filling up with sand and you have to get out of there, and the lever that you just pushed to open this door 50 yards away is making this continuous pounding noise like some sort of monster from the deep and it all comes together to FREAK ME OUT.

Getting to Lava Reef would always mean putting down the controller and taking some deep breaths and just thanking the powers that be.

Also,

Just started HL2 today... headcrabs... ugh...

I think what scares me more than headcrabs though are those weird things on the ceiling with long tongues. They're ALWAYS in dark places, out of sight, with their little tongues hanging down to get you! AH!

HAHAHAHAHAHA have fun with Ravenholm. Hey I cut that zombie in half with a fan, sweet. HOLY SHIT THE TOP HALF IS CRAWLING AFTER ME.

[SLyGeN]

On the subject of dreams, I think the freakiest game dream I ever had was wandering through an empty school that had clutter all around it like the school in Silent Hill. It even had the same creepy lighting.

My dreams often have low lighting. One can't easily control the lighting of their dreams. Because of this, if you find a lightswitch, you can figure out if your dreams are lucid or not.

I don't know if it's a phobia, but I kinda tweak out a little when appliances start acting up. When I BSOD or get a virus warning, I get a shot of adrenaline and a chill down my back, just because of the fact that something I use often is malfuntioning. And, back to the topic of lighting, sometimes I have nightmares about not being able to use lightswitches, and they do not become lucid for me. Lightswitch malfuntioning-- the only source of respite in a dark hallway. Freaky shit.

I am assuming you haven't played System Shock 2 then? =P I think that's why I liked the game so much.

You would be correct. What system is it for? What about a System Shock 1?

[I-n-j-i-n]

Concurred.

Only game I've played that genuinely scared me was Zelda: OoT. And I loved that about it! I thought the bottom of the well was utterly terrifying (though strangely the shadow temple never really bothered me).

For the longest time, even though I was a pretty obsessive completionist in these types of games, when I got to the well it was get in, get the lense, get the fuck out, and fuck whatever else was in there. I've only recently (like, since I graduated highschool) been able to go back and really do a thorough search of the well.

You should see the ocean depths in the Dreamcast Ecco game. Those waters were just frightening and not simply because of the typically insanely-difficult Ecco difficulty. There's the ocean shelf and it suddenly drops off into nothingness and all you get are swift ocean currents near it. I love water personally, but the bottom of the ocean sea giving away into the abyss was pretty scary to watch.

[friendlyHunter]

You would be correct. What system is it for? What about a System Shock 1?

It's for PC, legal to download - and if I recall it comes with a patch that fixes some gameplay issues involving too many enemies spawning...?

About System Shock 1... I tried to play it but I couldn't handle the difficult controls and gave up... so I can't exactly recommend it =p

Light switches not working is a recurring thing in my dreams, but I can't recall it happening ever in nightmares (nightmares are very rare for me, and usually only turn nightmarish at the very end). I was gonna go off on a tangent about the lighting in my dreams (and the sunlight from my window shining into my eyes and being visible inside my dream!), but my last three nightmares are much more interesting and relevant to the thread:

The first one (months ago), there was a bee hovering around the floor of a bus shelter and I thought "ok that thing better not try to sting me" and sure enough it starts harassing my face, and I wake up.

The second one (weeks ago) is freaking messed up; you might not want to read this at night: So I'm in my room (the room where I'm sleeping) and I get up to go to the bathroom, and I see in a mirror, the reflection of a baby's head and it scares the shit out of me, though there's nothing scary about it aside from the fact that there SHOULD NOT BE the reflection of a baby's head in my mirror! And then everywhere I look that baby's head is reflected in every reflective surface in the room, always at the same angle and orientation (profile facing to the right, slightly towards me), looking still and lifeless like a doll, but as real as a living baby, except perhaps inhumanly too large. I think I remember opening the door to leave my room and then I wake up, and the lighting in my room is the same as it was in the dream... fun times =\

Third nightmare (days ago): I'm in my back yard, all is well (except my next-door neighbours have a new fence right across the middle of their back yard for some reason involving the neighbours behind them), but I digress... a bee is stinging my mom in the neck so I start to panic, and this 1.5-inch wide circle of what looks like yellow pollen appears on her around the sting, and I try to knock the bumblebee off but its butt is stuck there quite firmly. A few more more vigorous tries and the bee's free, but of course it starts to attack me. I'm feeling pretty defenseless, and the bee starts going at my right leg, trying to get through my jeans (or trying to get its stinger through at least). I don't know WHY or IF I lifted up the leg of my jeans, but then it was stinging my leg - again the yellow circle of powder appears around the bee, little particles of dust clinging to my leg hairs, the big fat (well, AVERAGE fat) bumblebee's stinger stuck way the F into my leg, and then I wake up. Yet bees in videogames don't bother me one bit for some reason =/ Actually that nightmarish scenario was the ending to a rather epic dream involving an OOT-type game. Holy shit I just realized that dream is insanely relevant to this thread, and worth describing:

So I'm in this game that could really be any 3D Zelda game... I'm in this place that would take a very long time to describe, but I'm in some part of a building I'm not supposed to be, and this security guy is pointing a silenced pistol at me (keep in mind everything else is a least somewhat Zelda-themed), so I go back to area where the public is allowed. So this building leads out to a beach, and I start some kind of side-quest involving watching talking fish, and then I think they turned into Zoras or some other fish-people (and no, I was NOT attracted to them!!) and it was some kind of counting or music or memory minigame that I can't quite remember (HA!). All I remember is that there were 4 or so groups of three of them, and for whatever reason I was counting them (I'm as confused as you are). I don't remember getting any item from it either so I guess I didn't win, but I start to swim around the body of water (I'd call it a lake, though it's not nearly as deep as lake Hylia, and was more like a beach, actually like a mini version of the one in Majora's Mask), and then I'm swimming around and leaping like Zora link... feels pretty damn liberating (though I still prefer flying dreams and super-jumping-power dreams!)

You know how 3D open-world games like Zelda often have gigantic sheer walls of vaguely forest-looking textured stuff at the edges of the map to keep the player from escaping? Well both sides of this big lake had this; thinking about it now it's kind of funny So anyway, swimming across the entire lake was fun and not at all frightening, although I distinctly recall there was some villain or creature after me (Ganon? Nazgul? Sharks?)... in any case, at the other end of the lake were some islands that had an awesome song that I can no longer remember, and some friendly minigame-hosting NPC folks. So I traveled back and forth to different islands interacting with NPCs and searching for stuff a bunch of times... How I got to my back yard for the finale; I have no idea.

Haha sorry for the wall of text I thought the bee stuff was relevant to the widespread fear of bees and wasps in this thread, but everything else... well, my apologies XD

[DuskyFerret]

Yeah OOT made me jump many times as a young kid, but it was the forest areas that got me the worst.

Like going back to the Sacred Forest Meadow as an adult and walking right through expecting those Deku Shrubs to still be there and getting mauled by some giant beast with a spear. Man they scared the shit outa me.

And the wolves and their piercing howl, and not to mention the bgm for the entire Forest Temple.

[I-n-j-i-n]

I was startled more by the horrible sound quality of OoT sound effects than anything. It sounded so garbled, everything just sounded a bit creepy to me. I never liked voicing in games that didn't use a CD to do it. Always horribly garbled and creepy.

[Muskweeto]

The sewer level in Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire for N64 scared me the most, I start to have panic attacks when I try to go in the water then I freak out when I see one of those monsters swimming around. It's been many years but I remember finally getting up the nerve to get through most of the level then it got to a point where the room I was in started filling up with sewer water and that's when I quickly paused the game then turned it off... haven't played since.

I also have a strange fear of loud banging noises. In Majoras Mask a feeling of pure fear runs down my spine whenever I walk past the part of Clock Town where the construction sounds are.

And I'm a huge fan of Silent Hill but they still sometimes scare me to the point I'm not having fun anymore.