I am a very boring person · 9:20pm May 24th, 2013
Hey everyone! It's been a while since I've made a blog post. Because reasons.
Those reasons being that I haven't written a whole lot, plus barely anything has happened, so... Yeah. Uh. Stuff is coming soon! I'm writing a thingamabob for EQD's Memorial Weekend Event, even though we don't have anything even closely resembling a holiday like that over here blah blah blah it gave me a good excuse to write something. I swear it doesn't involve changelings. Seriously. I deny everything. It's all lies. Shut up, mom.
So what have I been doing in the meantime? Well, this won't surprise anyone at all, but I have been playing video games. Working through my backlog. Tales of Phantasia, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, Metro: Last Light, and Dead Space. I also started playing Tales of Legendia. Yay RPGs! But what I've noticed while playing these games is...
I am a very boring person. Like, incredibly boring. Boring beyond comparison. Okay, maybe not as boring as watching paint dry or grass grow, but still pretty boring.
As you might have noticed from that list of games, most of them include horror elements. The only ones not featuring horror at all are the Tales games, which I'll probably make some blog post on later.
I used to be incredibly bad with horror. I was frightened of the dark when I was a kid, and even in my early teens. When push came to shove, I could be pretty courageous (braving a dark forest at night for an initiation thing, as the only kid doing that alone got me quite some respect), but push barely came to shove. Horror movies scared the living bajeezus out of me, I couldn't look at gross stuff at all, the usual. Which was actually kind of crippling, because my inherent curiosity for every single thing ever would continuously drive me to look up horror stuff, leading to numerous sleepless nights. Back then, in addition to being boring, I was evidently quite stupid as well. No idea if that's changed.
Anyway, as people often do when they grow up, I changed. The past few weeks, I started noticing this. I had heard Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem was one of the scariest games out there. Creepy story, frightening effects, it was considered an absolute marvel of game design. So how do I play it? Well, something like this:
Picture some dark ruins. They're filled with ancient architecture, mysterious runes, and the whispers of those long deceased... Or is that just the wind? The halls are dimly lit with torches, casting ominous shadows all throughout the rooms and halls. Corpses litter the ground as our hero, a fat bastard with a halfway decent sword and a crummy crossbow, moseys on through. Suddenly, the corpses rise, casting their deadly gazes upon the man, their mere glances pushing him closer and closer to insanity. One corpse even bursts apart, revealing a thin, screeching monstrosity with scythe-like claws, known as a bonethief.
Our hero, outnumbered, but not out-fatted, slowly inches away, but too late: the monsters are already aware of his presence, and are closing in on him at a frightening pace. Having no options left, the man... pulls out his sword and starts cutting the everloving shit out of all these wusses. After the deed is done, he uses some spells to get his sanity back up, and then solves some kind of puzzle. He is then promptly murdered in a cutscene.
It's the kind of mood whiplash you get when you go to MacDonald's and are told they're out of burgers, and only have these sissy salads! Or like paying a prostitute and then being told "Sorry, I only do friendly hugs"! But this isn't really the game's fault, it's on my end. I'll show it by telling you about my experiences with Dead Space, which I'm sure a decent number of you are familiar with:
Dead Space takes place on the USG Ishimura, a giant spaceship created to mine out entire planets. Something went down there, and nobody's responding. Isaac Clarke, an engineer and our unlikely hero, joins a team to repair this ship. He's very concerned about his girlfriend Nicole, who works there. When the team arrives, the ship is abandoned, and not the kind that says "We just went out for a while". No, it's quickly revealed that the entire crew has been murdered and turned into hideous space zombies (or necromorphs), which really want to kill everything. Isaac is separated from the others, and is without weapons. For an entire minute, after which he finds a plasma cutter, an engineering tool that's surprisingly good in making a mess of zombies.
So, after about an hour and a half of being somewhat frightened by suddenly appearing monsters and generally pretty nasty and disturbing stuff, Isaac has collected some more weapons, run into even nastier monsters, and shot a whole bunch of them. Two special tools he gets are the statis and kinesis modules. Stasis allows Isaac to slow stuff down for a while, kinesis allows him to lift, reposition and throw heavy stuff. Pretty cool, but it won't save him from the fear induced by his own mind. Does that clanking mean a necromorph is about to appear? Or is the sudden, ominous silence the harbinger of death? Walking past one of the many broken, flickering lights, Isaac stumbles upon a horrific sight: numerous mutilated corpses, and not a single necromorph in sight. Where did they go? Are they hiding, waiting for the right moment to strike?
After a few hurried moments of scouting the room for valuable ammo, a necromorph assaults Isaac. Through sheer luck, the engineer manages to behead the monstrosity, but even then, the disgusting creatures continues its assault. After a few hurried blasts, the monster keels over and stops moving. Isaac, having just had the scare of a lifetime... lifts the dismembered necromorph with his kinesis module and places it in an incriminating pose on top of one of the mutilated human corpses in the room. On second glance, that one murdered guy, slumped over in his chair, with his arm torn right off? His posture is really bad, so Isaac decides to use his kinesis module to put the guy in a more comfortable position. Because the physics engine of this ship is really crappy, the corpse just ends up planking on top of the chair, so Isaac gives up and stomps the guy's legs off.
This is not exaggerating or anything: this is how I actually play these games. Sure, the first hour or two is filled with genuine fright and during this time, I'll always be incredibly careful. But after a while, it starts becoming obvious. If I attack a certain monster this way, it can't do anything against me. A new room? Let's see... Monsters will start appearing from that vent there, that vent there, and maybe from the roof. I'll just grab this big weapon, charge it up, and unleash it on the first monster I see.
Excessive gore, general creepy atmospheres and the odd jumpscare don't scare me anymore. I've become so savvy of things, it's almost boring: instead of going "Doot doot doOOH MY GOD A MONSTER AAAH!" my reaction is now far more likely to be "Doot doot doo— Oh hey, a monster. *bang* Now let's see what kind of silly stuff I can do with you." Followed by incredibly juvenile activities, like toilet humour, porn jokes, and quoting Shakespeare. My brother came looking to check out what I was doing, and promptly burst into laughter over me screwing around with a corpse.
The evidence is quite clear: I am boring. A straight-faced guy who takes things considered 'the scariest thing ever' in stride and laughs in their collective face (although not intentionally). Is this bad? Not necessarily. At least I can experience horror stuff like any normal person now. Though 'normal' is kind of a stretch, I don't think my reactions to this stuff are quite up to par.
I'm actually quite eager to play some more horror stuff. Though not of the jump scare-only variety, those are just boring.
Oh, and Metro: Last Light? Holy moly that game freaked me out so bad. Violence is a good way to cope with your aggressors, but it doesn't help when the thing that's freaking you out are these ghosts you can only see in your peripheral vision. And they're just standing there. I really wanted to return to the freaky monsters at that point, even the swamp that really stressed me out.
But for now, I'll just return to the most diabolical and fright-inducing thing of all: writing about ponies. (Dun dun dunnn)
damn, thats a long one
Eh, games like Dead Space stopped getting to me as well. I wouldn't say you are boring, more like laid-back and easy-going. Thats how I am normally viewed as in person, because pretty much nothing shakes me.
Now, zombie Dolly Parton in a clown outift, THAT would scare the ever-loving shit out of me. Anything else? Pffft.
Funny how Metro gives you 3 heavy weapons, 6 knives, various survival tools and 3 different kinds of things that go boom and still managed to make you feel like you're on the bottom the food chain.
I normally don't do anything horror related, but when I do, the best reaction you would get from me is simply a jump.
Rather than being boring, I'm almost completely quiet.
That is, when I'm not talking to myself or laughing at the guy's body part that is flipping through the air.
Would you recommend buying metro last light, I've been debating buying that one.
You are a boring person, it says so right here in your test report.
Btw have you played Half Life 2? That game can be quite scary from time to time. (Ravenholm, duh)
I look forward to your entry for the event :3
And I gotta pick up Last Light...
I thought that was more or less the normal response to multiple hours of dead space. I remember doing things like using the spikes to pin the remains of everything to walls and such.
~N
1102475
Have you played the first game Metro 2033? I recommend trying that out first cause if you haven't you probably won't get the story. They explain some of it at the beginning though. Also beware as there are a lot of random nude scenes in Last Light. One minute you're killing mutants and the next minute you're in a strip club getting the most detailed first person lap dance in the history of gaming.
No see, the problem is that those "horror" games that don't scare you anymore are pretty much just action games with a horror theme. You can tell how because the main goal is to kill swarms of monsters and feel all empowered and whatnot in an action game, wherein a horror game tries to make you feel as though you aren't powerful.
They are trying to accomplish fundamentally different things, which is how you get such surreal moments as arranging corpses in funny poses when you are clearly supposed to be terrified of the monsters.
*eagle cry*
Have you ever thought about watching paint dry on growing grass? It's a rather boring combination.
Nothing's scarier than adding a few more diamonds to your bag of loot and hearing the oh-so-familiar noise that makes your heart skip ten beats.
TSSSSSSSSsssssssssss....
*sobs*...The outside is bad... don't go outside at night... or day... don't go outside... DON'T GO OUTSIDE!!!!
*curls up in a ball and rocks back and forth*
If you listen to Yahtzee, he doesn't consider the Dead Space series horror at all. He makes some valid points.
Ze video
So... *Shrug*
Anyway, more pony fics from you =
i learned from my buddy before i began playing deadspace 1 a couple years ago. stop every corpse into pieces. espeshily since a few areas will respawn the corpses you smashed to pieces, but not always however. I remember one room with a corpse in a chair, I dragged the corpse off the chair and smashed it to pieces, i had to come back and a converter necro was in that room, and the corpse was back in that chair.. but only the torso
and the converter sat wrapped onto this torso stabbing the chair trying to turn the torso into a necromorph.
I recommend Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Slender: The Arrival.
Ya they're pretty mainstream but there's a good reason they're considered scary: You CAN'T fight back. So unlike Dead Space there's never a point where you look around a room, identify entry points, pull out a big gun and kill the enemies before they can touch you with your superior intellect. Nope. Just run. or hide. or die. or go
.
But YAY more fanfiction. So what are you thinking? A new story? A second Sequel? A crossover? Comedy? Horror? Grimdark? Shipping? Hell Ill read it all!
...except maybe the horror and grimdark. I never understood why people liked to blend the cute cuddly ponies with gore, death and/or insanity.
1102475
Definitely. It's the rare type of game where you're given lots of tools to survive with, and it still manages to feel incredibly tense and stressful at every moment. It's a vast improvement over 2033, though it's a shame the ultra-hard ranger mode costs 5 bucks extra.
1102498
I did, right when it came out! Ravenholm was pretty scary back in the day.
1103070
I wholeheartedly agree. I quickly found out there's not much horror to something if you have a big gun to keep the creepies at bay with. It was still a fun game, though not in the way the developers intended.
1102752
The real horror of Eternal Darkness was in the overarching story and the low sanity effects.
1102752 That's a nice everything you've got there...