Scariest Amiga gaming moment

[Harrison]

The best way to experience them is to play them in sequence from the original PSX game, and then on to the PS2 games, but if you only want to play games with PS2 quality graphics then give Silent Hill 2 a try.

I personally still like the original Playstation game the most as it contained a great balance of combat, horror and puzzle solving. It was all quite logical and not easy to get lost of stuck. It also had some interesting alternative endings. I think one issue with the later games was that it was sometimes easy to find yourself at a point in the game not knowing what to do or which direction to travel and having to just experiment and try everything until you discovered something that moved the story on. This never happened (for me) in the original first game.

Trust us, you tried the worst of the series with the 4th game and it doesn't convey the quality of the others. I personally thought The Room was a good game, but it didn't stick to the same structure or ideas of the previous games.

One of the greatest features of the Silent Hill games is the shift of reality. You are never prepared or pre-warned that it is about to happen. One moment you could be walking down a perfectly normal deserted city street with a eerie sense that something is not right, feeling uncomfortable with your radio gently hissing in the background and strange sounds in the distance, then suddenly without warning the radio static would increase and the street would shift into the hell dimension where everything is the same but different, replaced with rusting structures and dismembered bodies hanging on metal fences, the sounds of things shifting around and crawling towards you, disfigured forms that once resembled people, hospital equipment discarded and covered in blood and other dried bodily fluids. Very gross! And the sound of industrial machines and boilers working away.

If you want to experience some of the best horror depicted in a game to date you definitely have to give SH2 a try, or even SH1 if you don't mind the Playstation one graphics.

Another aspect of the earlier games that were actually set in Silent Hill itself is the fog. This adds a great sense of apprehension because you cannot see far ahead of your current location when walking in the city. Not knowing what is just out of sight really added to the tension. And when you were injured and the controller was recreating your increased heart rate that also really added to the anxiety of the environments. It's also a requirement to play this game late at night with all of the lights out and a good surround sound system connected and turned up.

The music in this series is also really good.

[Sharingan]

The music in this series is also really good.

Akira Yamaoka FTW

That's a good description of SH2. It's one of the rare games that manages to be frightening, even if nothing much is actually happening.

Try playing the game in the dark, with your surround sound system turned up to max. Guaranteed to give you the shivers. The sound effects in the SH-series are really amazing.

I never got into Silent Hill 4, to be honest. Had so many unfinished games floating about, I didn't get around to continue playing it beyond the first part. The unkillable ghouls were pretty annoying, that's the part I do remember.

[Teho]

Yep, that's pretty much what happened with me too. I thought the game itself was decent enough but those ghost-things were just so annoying, and not the least bit scary. So after one evening of play, I never picked it back up. This happens with a lot of games, sadly. It's just so many that after the first couple of goes I don't find good enough to keep playing to the end these days.

One Amiga game that hasn't been mentioned here yet is Elvira Mistress of the Dark. It wasn't just the gore, I remember I found the general atmosphere in that one pretty chilling as well back in the day. Always afraid that one of those guards is going to come around the corner and hack your head off, or when getting to a new section of the castle you were always worrying about what kind of gruesome death you were going to meet next. Because you always did, and had to figure out afterwards how to avoid it. It was the first horror game I ever played that really did give you a sense of dread. Did for me, anyway.

[Harrison]

That is always sad when games are really good but contain one section that just frustrates the player into eventually giving up because it is too tedious and hard to pass. I know I've given up on quite a few games over the years due to this.

[toomanymikes]

For me it has to be It came from the Desert - theres a knock at the front door, nothing unusual as your neighbours regularly come round to visit, but when you open the door theres a freaking huge ant face accompanied with really loud horror movie music. I was about 12 when i first saw it and it made me turn the amiga off at the PSU. What a wuss!

[Tiago]

In PC "Fantasmagoria - a puzzle of flesh" was very very scary.

[Tomski]

I used to be sh1t scared of the mud monsters in MOONSTONE.

Every time they appeared out of the ground There would be a horror movie style, piercing sound effect! Anyone remember??

I could never complete that game though, it always used to crash

[Puni/Void]

Tomski wrote:

I used to be sh1t scared of the mud monsters in MOONSTONE.

Every time they appeared out of the ground There would be a horror movie style, piercing sound effect! Anyone remember??

I could never complete that game though, it always used to crash

This really brings back memories from those long sessions of Moonstone back in the days. I remember those scary monsters as it were yesterday. We even had a special name for them: "Orgelfysjer" (Norwegian). This means something like Orgeldudes in English. This was because of the sound they made when they suddenly popped up from the mud. We were kids at that time and did of course find it a bit scary.

I've never managed to complete it either, due to it crashing when entering the Valley of the Gods. I seem to recall that the game also crashed if a moonstone appeared in the inventory, but I might be wrong about that one.

[Tomski]

The dragon that used to patrol aswell!!!
Was it even possible to beat it?
......BECAUSE I NEVER DID!

[Sharingan]

I used to be sh1t scared of the mud monsters in MOONSTONE.

Every time they appeared out of the ground There would be a horror movie style, piercing sound effect! Anyone remember??

I could never complete that game though, it always used to crash

Now that you mention the mud monsters, yeah, those were pretty damn scary too. As were the rat men - vicious little buggers. Of all the enemies in Moonstone, I probably liked killing rat men the most ... nothing like having a bloody screen full of gutted rat men! Ahem.

I couldn't complete the game either, due to random crashes. A real shame.

As for the dragon, I THINK I've managed to beat it ... it's been a while though, so maybe I'm just imagining things.