Hi-Tech Horror - Computer Games

[lemming13]

Yes, I'm at it again with the new-fangled techie stuff, but I think people sometimes miss out on a really enjoyable experience because they're afraid to sample it or just have a prejudice against it. Fifteen years ago I regarded computers with the kind of dark suspicion Hammer villagers reserved for the guy who just got off the coach in downtown Carpathia, and now I would gladly have a jackplug inserted into my skull so I can commune with the machine more closely. (oh, hang on - beginning to get a bit creeped out by that now...).
Be that as it may, I got into point and click games a while back via the old Playstation and a game called Necronomicon. Unlike most console games, it did not demand fast reflexes and a willingness to suffer tendon synovitis to achieve a move, but it did require a keen puzzle-solving intelligence and a fondness for being utterly creeped out. The plot put you in the persona of a 1920s college graduate, William Stanton, trying to find out why his best friend has gone mad, and what the pyramid-shaped object he handed to Stanton actually is. In the process you explore some delightful locations including a desolate, degenerate New England fishing port, a rotting clapboard house full of nasty old books and demented graffiti, and an underground labyrinth around a huge, ancient structure from before the dawn of time. I loved it, and regretted that there were almost no other console games of that type. Then I moved up to the pc, and my horizons opened out immensely. There are dozens of good horror games, and mysteries too; I've investigated Murder on the Orient Express with Poirot, and hunted Arsene Lupin with Sherlock Holmes. At the moment I'm spending the last hour or so of every night sitting in a darkened room with headphones on, merrily scaring myself with Dark Fall : Lost Souls. What's the appeal? Well, a good point and click gives you the chance to put yourself into the story, and influence the outcome. True, the programme will offer limited choices for what you can and can't do, and most have a Good/Bad ending option, but even the limited ones can be a real thrill ride, and some offer several different possibilities for the outcome. I'll be posting up brief synopses of some favourites of mine, and possibly warning you off some stinkers, in future.

[andydecker]

Aug 22, 2010 16:06:24 GMT lemming13 said:

Yes, I'm at it again with the new-fangled techie stuff, but I think people sometimes miss out on a really enjoyable experience because they're afraid to sample it or just have a prejudice against it. .

Nah, it isn´t a predjudice. I just don´t like them. I sampled a few games like the first DOOM, PHANTASMAGORIA, a few LARA CROFT.

Either they gave me a headache (I mean a real headache) or you can throw them into the trash when you have to update your system. Also you have to have a state of the art PC to run them smoothly. For instance I bought the last (?) DOOM out of nostalgia - blasting at monsters is fun - and couldn´t even run it because it kept crashing.

Also those games afford so much time.

So the enjoyment (for me) isn´t worth the hassle. I know taht I am in a minority in this. I can understand why those games are so attractive, but on the other hand, they kept a generation from reading.

[Dr Strange]

Ditto what Andy said. When I was a student I played a lot of different sorts of computer games on a lot of different platforms. The only ones I personally could really get into were the mindless first-person shoot em ups - Doom, etc. - most of which I actually finished, which shows how much I played them (actually, way too much at times). The problem solving-ones I just thought were dull - I'd much rather read a book. I haven't played any computer games for years now, and to be honest I just don't have the time anymore - and I certainly don't want to end up reading less.

[lemming13]

Each to their own, guys, but Doom and the rest of the FPS genre were what put me off gaming for so long. If I want to exercise my fingers and my wrists, there are so much more enjoyable things to do than wrestle a joypad to achieve a high kill-ratio. The games I go for exercise my brain, which I agree reading also does, but in a different way. And the best of the point and clicks offer so much more than just problem solving. For instance, the Dark Fall series was created by an enthusiast for Sapphire and Steel, the old horror anthology series, and writers such as M R James. In fact, Dark Fall: The Journal is set at the old railway station and hotel that figured in the second Sapphire and Steel story, and makes both textual and visual references to it - your character is investigating the disappearances of several people there, including a parapsychologist named George Tully. It's the atmosphere of the good ones that makes it worth while. Personally, I got the most delicious chill when I peeked out from the railway bridge and saw the ghostly soldier whistling his little tune. And the latest one gets seriously unsettling, just from using little flashes of imagery and sound effects.

I also agree that anything that takes people away from books is bad, but I've used these games in just the opposite way. I know several teenagers now who had never (I do mean literally, NEVER) read a book outside of those required for school. One of them, now 21, had a teacher who thought he was madly enthusiastic for a particular writer because he took one book of theirs out of the school library repeatedly. but it was simply that he was ordered to borrow one and that was nearest the library door. He had never even opened the cover. I lent his mother my copy of Barrow Hill, and he loved it, so then I told him that it was inspired in part by the classic Doctor Who story Stones of Blood. She found the novelisation in a secondhand shop, and he actually read it, cover to cover. Now he reads everything Wordworth release in the horror and mystery genre, has a huge collection of paperbacks, and his pc and games console actually get cold while he reads. Others have gone on from playing Lost Crown and Darkness Within to reading M R James and H P Lovecraft. So it can be a lever to prise them off the machinery and into reading. As for me, I'm an insomniac, so I have plenty of time for reading and games.

[Dr Strange]

Computer games were always about switching off, rather than switching on, the thinking parts of the brain for me. Not sure it always really worked though, as I used to have Doom-themed dreams - or was that Quake? Either way, I really enjoyed those dreams, but didn't exactly wake up refreshed from them.

[David A. Riley]

Doom and Quake I can live with. I used to love those games - though I didn't like Doom 3. That seemed boring after the earlier ones.

I have only just managed to escape, though, from something far more horrifying than either of these. An addiction to Evony. That online wargame is insidious in how it draws you in and keeps you trapped. It's the most addictive thing I have ever been involved with.

I played that for just over a year, during which time I gave up twice, only to log in again a week or so later. I finally kicked it by taking the drastic action of resetting everything to the start, losing everything I had built up for my hero. Now there's just no point in logging in again.

Anyone who has ever played this game will know exactly what I mean.

[Craig Herbertson]

Necronomicon.

I've mentioned this one before to a combination of dumbfounded silence and thinly veiled mockery. I cannot analyse why I like this game.

It has great titles for the cards, creepy music, nothing happens really. You against a fellow sorcerer playing cards. Its just addictive.

In my defence I don't play any other stupid games except for a mild obsession with Age of Empires

www.kongregate.com/games/GamesofCthulhu/the-necronomicon

[lemming13]

Okay, couldn't resist playing it, and I admit, it has a certain hypnotic fascination. Subliminals in the music, maybe. And it stopped me playing Civilisation IV for a bit - can't help it, when I start on that I just can't stop till the world is mine, bwahaha... Of course, I was only filling in after finishing Lost Souls (superbly creepy) and waiting for the arrival of LImbo of the Lost.

[lemming13]

I just had to mention this one for those with greater co-ordination than I have. My son has spent the afternoon killing zombies while I surfed the internet archive for new treasures for my Kindle, and I couldn't even focus on the delights of Algernon Blackwood for the hilarity. Dead Rising is the game; I know there are other zombie bash-em-ups (the lad is fond of Left For Dead in all its forms), but I have never seen anyone take down a zombie with a king salmon or a stuffed bear before. Achingly funny.