5. Silent Hill 4: The Room -- The Pink Bunny; Konami; PS2, Xbox; 2004

Now I've played my share of Silent Hills and Resident Evils, and I've cried, cowered in a corner, and tossed the controller to one of my friends as I escaped in terror. But one moment in Silent Hill 4: The Room will haunt me forever.

If you don't know, The Room is about this guy trapped in his apartment with a single dark portal leading toward doom. Despite being trapped, you can still see some of the outside world. If you look into the hallway through the peephole, you may spot the maid vacuuming the halls. You can look outside and watch the traffic. But most importantly, you can look into a tiny hole behind your dresser and spy on your young, female neighbor. Sometimes she's on the phone, sometimes she's just walking back and forth, and sometimes she's just not there at all.

This is when you notice the pink bunny: a cute little stuffed bunny slouching on a chair, opposite the peephole. Whatever, it's just a pink rabbit right? So look once, look twice, look a thousand times and your neighbor and the pink bunny won't startle you in the least.

Until one arbitrary part in the game. Per usual, you look through the peephole. Your neighbor is nowhere to be seen. But there, right across the room, sits the pink bunny, staring at you with a big, mocking grin and pointing directly at you. The game then forces you to stare at this horror - you cannot pull away.

A full 30 seconds later, you finally manage to tear yourself away from the peephole. Look again, and it's just a little stuffed bunny, slouching on a chair. Thanks, Silent Hill. You officially turned stuffed animals into my worst nightmare. -- Meghan Watt; Staff Writer

6. Aliens vs Predator -- Locating the Alien; Sierra/Rebellion Developments; PC; 1999

The first pants-wetting moment I had in a video game was probably the scariest, and it came down to playing as the Colonial Marine in the campaign of the original Aliens vs. Predator. You see, when I installed the game and played it I was supposed to keep the second disc in the drive to hear the game music. I didn’t realize that (read: didn’t read the manual) until far later.

So in playing the game in more or less silence, at night, and in the dark my sense of hearing was quite amped up as I tried to listen for the sounds of claws scraping across metal. Sure you have a motion detector and some flares to light up the darkness, but it didn’t make you want to pee yourself and back into a solid corner every single time one of those things made any sort of noise. It wasn’t the sight of the things that was scary; that meant you had found them and could deal with them. It was the hearing them and *not* seeing them that made me panic in my large, dark living room every single time. The Aliens are incredibly fast and can crawl on the walls and ceiling, which means you can turn around just in time to see one pouncing at you. Just thinking about it makes me want to sink into my chair a bit to suppress the hairs standing up on the back of my neck. -- Tony Mitera; Staff Writer