Any big plans? If you're dressing up, what are you going to be? My little holiday present to myself was a copy of Dracula X Chronicles, as you may have noticed I've been on a bit of a Castlevania kick lately. I have a long queue forming of games that are still in their shrink-wrap, though, so I dunno when I'll get to it. My life is so hard.One of my favorite ways to ring in the spooky season is with a good survival-horror marathon, so I thought I'd get your thoughts on which game you'd say has scared you the most. I frighten a bit easily -- I recall in particular the disemboweled, gurgling corpse-ghosts of Silent Hill 4 disrupted my sleep more than a little, but if I were pressed to choose, I'd crown the original Fatal Frame as the most frightening console game I've ever played. Though it won't be running until later this week, another scary game is the theme of this week's Aberrant Gamer.
Straight-up overt gore has never quite done it for me. I can't be bothered to watch things like the Saw series, Hostel or The Hills Have Eyes -- I think it's gross, not frightening. And while I find a good squishy splatterfest in a videogame gleeful, it doesn't frighten me (desensitized?). I'm much more unsettled by the traditionally Eastern approach to horror -- bloodless, pale and floating spirits of vengeance and empty-eyed, creepy children are way more my kinda thing. Fatal Frame 2 is also a close runner-up -- the madly cackling woman in the blood-drenched kimono really creeped me, but when I played the first Fatal Frame, with its wandering ghosts that still bore the marks of their death, like the drowned woman or the broken-neck woman (I think they were in the first, not the second), I was actually kept up late. I'd be right about to fall asleep, and then I'd remember the haunting echo of that Japanese children's song, the one that goes, "who is in the front of the back?" that is sung during a doll puzzle, and that'd be it. Anyone have any idea what I'm talking about?
On the PC front, my adolescence was positively traumatized by Phantasmagoria 2 (definitely the topic of a future Aberrant Gamer), which my parents should by no measure have allowed me to play, with its very graphic live-action deaths and BDSM sex scenes. When I wrote "Growing Up Gamer" for The Escapist, I explained that I think it was good that my parents didn't nose into what I was playing and challenged me to develop my own values, but if I were a mother, you can be sure my kid ain't playing Phantasmagoria 2. I literally could not finish that game because I couldn't get through the end scene, where the protagonist was recalling himself as a little boy being chased by his insane mother wielding a pair of hedge clippers, and the other part where he was being pursued by the rotting and vomiting zombies of all of his WynTech coworkers who had died during the game.
If you guys have played these, what are your thoughts? And what will you be playing tonight?
[Companion Cube pumpkin comes from Planet Half-Life.]
