by Rohan

As in life, there are moments in gaming where the only reasonable response is the phrase, “Oh, Shit!”

Now, this phrase, versatile as it is, can be used to mean a wide variety of different things – from “It appears that the killer is still alive,” to “I have been shot, please call for an ambulance as soon as possible,” and even the all-time classic, ”I admit to experiencing surprise and frustration at learning that you have, in fact, forgotten to bring the hummus.”

For this reason, I decided to recount a top-five list of these “Oh, Shit!” moments from my own personal gaming experiences, complete with imagery.

Number Five: Discovering Christopher and Inamo the Gargoyle’s corpse… Ultima VII

It’s not so much that you discover his corpse that provokes the “Oh, Shit!” It’s not even, really, the horrific state of the bodies. (Christopher has been quartered and Inamo has been impaled with a pitch-fork)

It’s really a matter of context. What context am I referring to?  Few games up to this point had included such unpleasant imagery (excluding maybe the Alone in the Dark or Ecstatica series’), nor had you directly deal with the emotional aftermath – from flustered officials to distraught children.

But that’s not the only reason.

The most important thing that made your skin crawl and prompted you to the utterance that this article about was this: The Guardian laughs at you. And there’s just simply nothing as scary as somebody laughing when you’re not in on the joke.

Number Four: When the lights go out, in a corridor, on the downed prison vessel Vortex Rikers… Unreal

Being the only surviving human on a crashed prison ship is bad enough. But what makes it worse is when it’s on an alien planet. And that, despite being the only remaining human aboard the ship – you are quickly made aware that you are certainly not the only living creature on the ship.

And so, after a number of well-done moments letting you just see or hear things out of the corner of your eye, you finally find yourself doing what we’d all be doing in this situation: creeping down a well-lit and perfectly safe corridor toward what you hope will be a weapon.

At the dead end, you turn around. Boy, this’d be kinda scary if it weren’t for these helpful ceiling lights.

There’s a THUD, and the first one, at the end of the corridor goes out.

That’s not good.

THUD. The second one goes out.

Hrm. That’s not good.

THUD. The third one.

This continues.

“Oh, Shit…”

Welcome to your first meeting with a Skaarj warrior.

Sure, these sorts of sequences have been done better in many games since then – Half-life, Bioshock… but back then, when this sequence will always hold a special place of bowel-evacuating terror for me.

Number Three: When your friend gets split off the group, and finds a monkey… System Shock 2

It’s a tragedy that rarely do the right games get full co-op support. The ones that tend to are often waffly, generic shooters with little to really make you benefit from true team-work.

System Shock 2 was not like that. The experience, a fantastic one in single-player, was brought to a new level of awesome when you had two friends playing with you. One marine, one hacker and one OSA psyker – the game became an all-immersing world of pain, fear and monkeys (much like the end of Monkey Island 2).

I’ve heard people say that the fear factor is reduced when you introduce a second player to a horror/survival game, but I’d argue that System Shock 2 serves to prove that this isn’t always true.

But it’s not the running, the screaming, the hacking and the running out of ammunition that made us utter, ‘Oh Shit’ almost in literal unison.

During a LAN: Two of us, the hacker and the psyker, are sorting through a walk-in storage cupboard, figuring out what chemicals and such are going to be useful for us. We had both played the game before. Our third player, the marine, was ‘exploring’ against our recommendation.

He heard a noise.

“What’s that?” he called out. Then he saw it. “Oh, hey! Look! It’s a monkey!”

We stared at each other. “Does he know what they… do?”

A head-shake. A pause. And in unison: ”Oh, Shit.”

Then came the screaming.

Number Two: When you know He’s Coming in a deserted hotel… Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines

Scary situations are not that hard to engineer, in theory. Just strip a player of weapons and/or ammunition, limit his spatial awareness and ta-da! Instant fear factor increase. But an important factor is fear in a game is the sense of control that having weapons and strength give you.

So, in Alone in the Dark, Edward Carnby walking around with just two rounds left in his revolver when any number of horrible creatures are lurking in shadows? That’s scary.

But what if you are the creature from the shadows? In Bloodlines you’re a vampire – and seemingly, an abnormally powerful one for a neonate. So by every definition I’d seen, things shouldn’t be that scary. I mean, you can tear most things apart with your fangs and hands alone, should it come to that. Shit, most of the time you don’t even bother carrying a fire-arm in the game.

When you’re paid to walk through a haunted house and find a simple object – no killing, no rescuing… it should be a piece of piss. And really, it is. By no measure is it a difficult assignment. Hell, it’s even explained at the beginning that it’s just a poltergeist. You know – grumpy, non-corporeal being that likes throwing shit around just generally being a nuisance. No threat to an undead creature like you.

Despite these things, one thing’s for sure, after ten minutes of crawling around this broken, ruined hotel and seeing things move of their own accord, you’re about ready to say it.

But wait – at least until you hear a little girl whisper in your ear, “He’s coming!”

Then it’s okay to say, “Oh, Shit…” and let your friends call you Mr Brown Pants from now on.

Number One: Duke, with a Pipe Bomb, in an adult cinema’s rest-room… Duke Nukem 3D

It’s not just scary situations that cause for the phrase, “Oh, Shit!”

After getting used to the generally-static mostly-serious worlds of the first-person shooters that came before, there was a very early experience in the first level of Duke Nukem 3D that, to me, was truly worthy of a nice utterance.

Killing pig-cops and jet-pack-using, teleporting monsters is pretty fun in Duke3D. But as fun as trip-mines, rocket launchers and a simple boot to the face can be, very little beats this experience:

You walk into a restroom. You clear the room of its single occupant and start exploring the room, from hidden weapons to witty comments painted on the mirror.

Then you hear it: the toilet flushes.

An enemy is taking a dump on one of the feral, crusty porcelain domes that pass for toilets in this place.

There’s nothing for it.

You toss a pipe-bomb over the stall door and detonate.

Blood splats on the ceiling above the stall.

“Awww, shit yeah!”

So, those are five of my notable “Oh, Shit!” moments.

What about your favourite scary or awesome gaming moments? Anything will do – as long as it’s worthy of a good expletive.

Tags: bloodlines, duke3d, rohan, system shock 2, ultima7, unreal

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 6th, 2010 at 6:54 pm and is filed under Article. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.