Never been so scared in my life (spoilers)

ya ravenholm is well-done.

in doom3, its too repetitive~~ i got scared once, its when i looked at the bathroom mirror..... sh*t, that wasnt fun.....
 
mr_natural48 said:
Ravenholm.

It is 2.00am, I have headphones on, sound up loud and I'm tired.
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Exact same thing for me. Absolutely terrifying.
 
i love that feeling and the suspence and everything. sure ravenholme was scary for me too but i loved that feeling, you know the feeling you got when a headcrab jumped at you out of nowhere in Half Life, plus no matter how scared i got i couldnt stop playin that level it was just too cool. anywayz just about to play HL2, finished it the other day and just wanted to do it again from the beginning, i liked the ending to what is it with people complaining about it? sorry if that was kinda off topic
 
ravenholm was great, not That scary but the most scariest part i played in the while. call me a sissy but i dont like resident evil =) i tend to find games scary when u have hard controls to kill them, and they come at u when u struggle to turn the crosshair,(RE).. in hl u just turn the mouse and "boom"! great game though.
 
Those black headcrabs can leap off very high! when I was on the roof of the building, those black headcrabs just leaped up at me, taking damage. I was like WTF WAS THAT?
 
Zombies popping out of the water in the airboat section was scary. But not "real" scary, just "pop-out" scary. Like it makes you jump.

The only thing that "really" scares me is the noise the fast zombies make when they are close to you and attacking. EEUGHGHG!!

It's hard to achieve "real" scary. Painkiller had a bunch of it though. That was a good game. (The haunted house part... EEEEEEE!!!)
 
Ravenholm was a good level, but it was only moderately scary, and only in the beggining. Don't get me wrong, I liked it, but at a certain point I was just begging for the level to end, I got a bit tired of it.


Doom 3 is much, much, MUCH scarier than Rvaenholm.
 
Max_Payne said:
people....wtf? lol ravenholm was not sacry. COOL yes... but scary? CMON! u want a twisted scary game? play the silent hill series... ****ing creepy.

PEACE

Mike :cheese:
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My word.

I have played trough all the Silent Hill games so Ravenholm and doom 3 was peace of cake to me.
 
i agree with everyone who says its the sound the uber-zombies make when they leap at you from any possible location. that high-pitched scream is what scared me, plus how theyre so damn fast and dont care where you go theyll climb and leap anywhere to get at you.
 
ravenholm was 1 of my fav levels but I didnt find it scary at all...

Scary Games: Doom 3 > Barbie Princess Bride > H a l f - L i f e 2
 
The_Great_Walter said:
Ravenholm was a good level, but it was only moderately scary, and only in the beggining. Don't get me wrong, I liked it, but at a certain point I was just begging for the level to end, I got a bit tired of it.


Doom 3 is much, much, MUCH scarier than Rvaenholm.
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This is a halflife 2 site but HL2 was nowhere near as scary as Doom 3. Not as much atmosphere, and whats up with the story? it wasn't that gripping!
 
Ravenholm wasn't so much as "jumpy" scary, I found it more unnerving. When the fast zombies came flying out of somewhere, my entire body went cold and my heart began to pump, as if I had seen the face of evil, and it was screaming and running at me.
 
i didn't really find ravenholm scary or jumpy at all. they tried to create an eery atmosphere and whatnot, but it just didn't do it for me.
 
a few parts that scared me were in highway 17, in the coastside houses... it was quite atmospheric. drive along, see a dillapidated old house. as you approach it you hear the thumpers creating a tense, rhythmic pulse that just sounds creepier as you get further into the house. how empty the houses appeared to be contrasts perfectly with what you found in some of them. good way to build the atmosphere. if you let yourself get sucked into the game the way i do, small parts like these can be quite creepy.
 
I thought the jail had a definate feel of eerieness to it.

Doom3 was fukcing scary too though. The fact you can't have your flashlight and gun out at the same time is scary, cause you see something then shoot it, and when its dark the only light you have is the muzzle flash. Also the part with that girls whispering was freaky.
 
Wow people, it wasn't THAT scary. It gave me a couple jumps (the fast zombies) but I didn't crap my pants.
 
kaption said:
I thought the jail had a definate feel of eerieness to it.

Yeah, especiall that first time you go through one of those tunnels created by something clearly inhuman, and you're thinking "something big is lurking around in here, and it's going to eventually try and kill me"
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I'd say Ravenholm is really creepy. You dont get really scared all the time but you feel constantly uneasy because of the athmosphere there.
 
The scariest things are those creepy black headcrabs, they're mainly a pain in the neck though....
 
I thought that when you first see the fast zombies jumping from the rooftops in ravenholm, and you only see their silhouettes and hear their howls was really scary.
 
Yeh those black and fast headcrabs get me going every time. Reminds me of the facehuggers from AVP, I could not go past a section that had those things in it!!!! :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:
 
Now that i think of it was quite tense and when you look back it was scary but at the time you were scared but didn't have time to think "yes i think im actually scared, like in doom 3 were its so slow and predictable) but man those evil looking headcrabs scared the shit out of me everytime i saw one basically because it could put your health right down to 1 which happened to me on a couple of occasions and since i had autosave disabled i really didn't want to be dying.
 
Ravenholme was very tense, and scary. As was the beginning was sandtraps.

I also found a couple of parts of City 17 scary, usually involving zombies, such as the infested basment (near where you meet barney). Walk down there, and here a dying guy, and he says about it being infested, and then there are zombies coming outta the water. And the bit in the collapsed tunnel, where you get most of the way across the car crashes, avoiding the toxic slime, and then the zombies start coming, lobbing barrels, and knocking you into the slime.

Also the poison zombie in Nova Prospekt (out of the way in a dark blood smeared room) was scary.

Although the Poison zombies/headcrabs scared me more than the fast zombies.
 
I didnt find Ravenholm even remotely scary, i thought it was like a funny b-movie horror film. Father Grigori just made the whole thing so ludicrously stupid theres no way you could find it scary imo. Even aside from him though it wasnt scary at all, you could tell it was intended to be, but it just wasnt imo.
 
im one of those people who when playing a game such as this, totally lose touch with reality. I truly feel i am in the game, and so when a fast zombie comes out, i am scared shitless.

The fact that you cant get away is the scariest. The normal zombies werent scary because they were slow, no threat. THe fast ones YOU CANT OUTRUN. That makes them VERY scary. This is the same for the ictyasaur (sp?) and the huge monster with the flamthrowers from HL1
 
I loved Ravenholm. It was kindof scary (note-3:00am+tired+cold) I liked the beginning, too. The whole scene with DOG and fetch then ravenholm was just great. I love those zombie sounds to death. All of the zombie sounds. As soon as I can I'm gonna go into the files and play those sounds over and over again. I love the moaning too y'know, half-human screams of pain/half screeches of the headcrab on top of them...
 
The only other time I was that scared in a video game was when I was five and playing Wolfenstein 3d; I was absolutely terrified of the dogs.
 
mr_natural48 said:
Ravenholm.

What more needs to be said?

This is by far the best thing in the game to this point.
It is 2.00am, I have headphones on, sound up loud and I'm tired.

The tension Valve builds in this level is absolutely brilliant. I am 22 yrs old and I am still shaking 20 mins later.

When the particular scene took place I didn't want to stray too far from the explosive barrels because I was running fairly low on ammo, I keep running slowly around killing as many stray zombies as I could without waking other things and then running back to the barrels. I kept walking further and further away and then next thing I know I'm surrounded by so many enemies and running around doing everything i could without getting killed.

It was pretty funny when I knew I had no hope of survival so I tried to make a run for it. The bloody door wasn't even real. I probably go back on when I calm down. :D
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Well .. I'm 18 and a computer game would never leave me shaking 20 minutes later :LOL:

Some horror movies do.. of course.
 
wont be as bad the third maybe fourth time round lol i know u will get there
 
I have to say, the first time I played Ravenholm (in the alpha :p ), the poison zombies scared the crap out of me. I just hated the way they sounded, as well as the poison headcrabs. I guess it doesn't help that I'm arachnophobic. The fast zombies were pretty scary, but only when they weren't climbing up a drainpipe. All you had to do was wait at the top with a shotgun and shoot them when their head pops up. :p

Overall though, I found Doom 3 a lot scarier, both in quick jumps and atmosphere. But Ravenholm was only a small part of HL2, and the fact that it managed to take on the entirely of Doom 3 at it's own game was quite an achievement.
 
"Never been so scared in my life"

you need to get out more....

actually dont. you're lucky!
 
hmh, Ravenholm didnt leave me with any particular motions, though I liked the atmosphere that were created there.
Only time I got scared in a game must have been the first Alone In The Dark, when it was released and I´m guessing I was 10 at the time. I think it was about the sudden music that bursted out of nowhere as the zombies made their way. Scared the heck out of me :D
 
!!!
I just replayed Ravenholm without the hud and without the reticule and was AWSOME-constant reloading+don't know your heath=LOTS of fun. enjoy.
 
we11er said:
Those fast zombies, with the black headcrabs - :S those are ****ing scary as shit
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i second that .... fast zombies + black headcrabs = recipe for scared
 
This may be a bit off topic, but I thought I'd mention it anyway - I think it's a bit funny that in Ravenholm it's pitch dark and when you pop out at the train yard an hour later (which, considering twilight had just set in when you reached BME, should be at around, say, 11 p.m.), you're back in broad daylight! A temporal anomaly?? Or just something along the lines of "Ravenholm is supposed to scare the living crap out of everyone so let's make it nice and dark"? Don't get me wrong - I loved Ravenholm - but I think that would be a mite on the corny side. Especially in view of the fact that Valve have shown they don't need darkness to create a spooky atmosphere. Some of the coast side houses along highway 17 actually scared me a lot more than the whole of Ravenholm ("Okay, I want to leave. I'm leaving. Now!").
Anyway, does this make me a nitpicker or does anyone have a plausible explanation?
 
MisterDeak said:
This may be a bit off topic, but I thought I'd mention it anyway - I think it's a bit funny that in Ravenholm it's pitch dark and when you pop out at the train yard an hour later (which, considering twilight had just set in when you reached BME, should be at around, say, 11 p.m.), you're back in broad daylight! A temporal anomaly?? Or just something along the lines of "Ravenholm is supposed to scare the living crap out of everyone so let's make it nice and dark"? Don't get me wrong - I loved Ravenholm - but I think that would be a mite on the corny side. Especially in view of the fact that Valve have shown they don't need darkness to create a spooky atmosphere. Some of the coast side houses along highway 17 actually scared me a lot more than the whole of Ravenholm ("Okay, I want to leave. I'm leaving. Now!").
Anyway, does this make me a nitpicker or does anyone have a plausible explanation?
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Well, you're right about the time thing; however, the game does not truly track the position of the sun by player minutes in game. It just adjusts it as you move from one part of the game to another; sort of like how 10 seconds on tv shows lasts for 90 seconds when the writers need it to. Ravenholm was dark for effect. I think it made is scarier because you had a hard time seeing where zombies were in many areas; you end up seeing this "thing" lurching out of a dark alley. Pretty creepy.

They did the same thing with Nova Prospekt (made it dark when you enter it so it would be scarier.) And it worked. Especially after being through Ravenholm, NP at night presented a serious feeling of dread.

Anyways, you have to use your imagination a bit. For example, when you are hanging out at BME, you can assume in plot terms you were there longer than the few minutes that the scenes actually take. Similarly, you "spent the night" in Ravenholm, even though player game time may have only taken at most a few hours.
 
Well, I agree with those who said Ravenholm was scary. (Note: This doesn't mean I feared for my life or actually thought a video game would hurt me; this means that adrenaline was pumping and felt similar emotions to what someone in Gordon's position would feel. Of course, I might not be as cynical as gen-y-ers ;))

I also agree with whoever said the game felt "oppressive". I think that's the right word for it, and the developers should be commended for conveying that feeling. The creepiness (IMO) starts off when you stop at the fork in the canal on your airboat and you can see that there was clearly a small settlement for someone near the runoff drain. There's a very eery feeling of loneliness to the place, with the wind blowing and the wind chimes. It's obvious the place has been deserted and you get the feeling like you shouldn't be there. Then, a zombie stumbles out of the tunnel. Excellently creepy and it hints at things to come.

Then you get to BME and Alyx tells you about Ravenholm. Nothing too bad about that, but it is obvious at that point that you don't want to go in there and equally obvious that you are going to HAVE to go in there...games can be a bit predictable sometimes...anyhow, in this case I think it worked (for me) because you knew ahead of time that you were going to have to go in some "awful place", so you had some time to let that sink in subconsciously and build up some dread about the next scene. While at the same time you are just having some "safe time" with Alyx and dog. Good pacing by the developers here to manipulate your emotions.

Then dog lets you in Ravenholm entrance and it begins. I felt pretty nervous when dog left and I was alone. Then you go past all the signs of abandonment and all the barricades; the locked barrier on the ladder was especially nice touch. All these little touches really make you feel like you shouldn't be going where you're going and the tension mounts. Then you get to the courtyard and you see how abandoned and eerily silent the place is and I definitely felt like I didn't want to be there and I wanted to leave as soon as possible.

Throughout Ravenholm, the developers did a great job with the sounds; the unearthly rattling of something in a nearby building, strange moans and howls coming out of the night...other nice subtle touches were the way the level was laid out: All the traps, the barricades, fences, and scaffolding really clued you in on how it would be like to spend a lot of time in that place and survive. The shells gave good indications of what happened in the town, and there are lots of signs of the horror it caused (dead bodies hidden away in various hidden spots gives the impression that people tried to survive by hiding, but were eventually found and killed; the infirmary shows that the townspeople tried to treat the infected, but were obviously unsuccessful) The animations of the zombies was good, too. The way they pick themselves up off the ground and stagger towards you is pretty realistic-looking; same with the way the poison zombie staggers around, weighed down with crabs.

The developers also did a good job of making you feel like you were never safe. I was constantly looking around to see if anything was sneaking up on me. Also, by having lots of dead zombies around (another subconscious clue as to what transpired in the town before you showed up) and have some of them actually be alive makes you have a difficult choice: Blast every body you see and waste ammo, or else prepare to have one of these things get up when you aren't watching and get you.

The part where you are chased by the fast zombies and you run into the room and shut the door, then they crash in through the skylight was absolutely brilliant.

Anyhow, I thought the level was brilliant in bringing out feelings of: Dread, desperation, mortality. It definitely makes one uneasy. It took me several nights to finish and I usually had a night or so off in between nights playing so I could work up my nerve to go back in.

(I just played through that level for the third time last night; this time I gave myself a bunch of vortigaunts and citizens as backup, plus made myself invincible and gave myself all the weapons. It was still creepy, but not scary. The vortigaunts absolutely slay everything. They are excellent body guards, but unfortunately they won't follow you like the citizens will. At one point I spawned "dog" to help me, but he ran away from the zombies and hid in an alley!)

Someone above mentioned the term "ambience" and I think that's a good word to use, too, for HL2. Ravenholm was especially good, but the game in general presented a really impressive "atmosphere". Part of that is the graphics, but I think the subtle clues (like I mentioned above) were very important, and I think most notable was the use of sound in the game. The use of sound was, IMO, genius and was the key to the atmosphere in the game.

Some commented that some of the outpost houses along the road were creepy and I agree. The game did a great job of making sure you never felt safe, even during the daytime. There was something very eery about the houses; they showed signs that they were abandoned, but something bad happened there. And it was very quiet (which is unusal because most of the game is fairly noisy.) Then you hear "something" (bad) inside. Someone mentioned the poison zombie in Nova Prospekt being creepy (and it was); there was also one in one of the houses along the coast road. Later on, in the tunnel, when the zombies come at you: That was brilliantly scary as well...
 
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