Trumpkin said:
I was thinking about this mainly as I played X-com terror from the deep. I realised that I still crap myself whenever I see certain baddies lurking around in the darkness, and then noticed that I never find myself becoming scared by the nasties modern games. I think that it has something to do with the simpler graphics, with all the pixels visible a lot more is added to the imagination. Once all the demons and aliens are presented to us in totally realistic 3D, it seems to lose all it's scariness. What do you think?
Some of the scariest games I've played don't specifically rely on graphical muscle to scare you. They rely on silence and what you can't see or hear. I'm with you Trumpkin, I played X-com: UFO Defense a couple of years ago and it was really tense and scary in places, not because of what I could see but because of the vague shapes moving around in the darkness. The music/drone gave much more strength to these feelings. Games like Waxworks and Dark Seed are the oldest games I can remember that really shitted me up because I think they were primarily uneasy (and I was very young!)
I played Yahtzees 5 Days a Stranger a few months ago and it was every bit as creepy as Dead Space, despite it's adventure game trappings and simplisitic graphics. In fact I think it was that empty silence in older games that really created an uneasy atmosphere. I loaded Alien on a Spectrum emulator some years ago and as Ripley navigated through the crudely and abstractly rendered ventilation shafts of the Nostromo there would occasionally be an archaic 'BLEEP' as you became aware of the Aliens position. This bleep would cut through the claustrophobic and otherwise empty silence with startling effect.
I think games with better graphics can have the same effect but I don't think they use them effectively. 'Horror' games are more showy these days and aim for the gutteral rather than that slow burning nightmare that all good horror acheives.
Interesting thread by the way.
Russian_Assassin said:
I don't know why, but old graphics scared the shit out of me. Maybe because the games were actually HARDER ... Seriously, no game has really scared me in the last 2 years or so. The same goes for movies. Hell I was more scared when reading the creepy stories thread!
On a side note, what would you people consider scary? Not trying to high jack the thread, just curious about other people's believes.
I bought the Penumbra games off Steam about a month ago and the first chapter so far is pretty terrifying... It's horror of the psychological kind, not that cheap visceral 'BOO!' nonsense in Dead Space or even the more recent Resident Evil games.
KneeLord said:
Yes, games where scarier when I was younger.
For a more substantial answer: The punitive qualities of difficulty in older titles gave death a greater sting, but part of the issue was that with limited audio/visual technical capacity, titles that wanted to be scary had to work a lot harder at it to create a tense atmosphere. The default minimalism of their special effects sometimes worked out in their favor - e.g. System Shock 2 or (much older) Out of This World.
These games raised the bar of the artistry in game ambience and atmosphere and it's this that makes their worlds all the more convincing, not necessarily because of the quality of the graphics and audio but because of their considered, sparing use of. Look at Super Metroid - that music and the desolation of Zebes; unrivaled.
