The Ocean Hotel scene was so well done it had me thinking to myself, "Wait...I'm the vampire here! I have more powers than I know what to do with! What am I freaked out about?" But it didn't matter -- it was so creepy, so expertly crafted to get your heart racing because you KNEW something would eventually leap out and scare you. But it never does. The entire 30-45 minute scene involved absolutely no combat whatsoever. But once I gathered the info that I needed, I could not wait to get the hell out of there. Games rarely get me like that. Even so called Survival Horror games are more about Monster Closet-jump outs rather than true mental fear. But that absolutely got me. -- William Abner, Editor in Chief

2. Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem -- The Lost Saves; Nintendo/Silicon Knights; GameCube; 2002

So there I was, playing Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem on the GameCube. Just like any other day, I get to a part where I can save and I go into the save game menu. Unlike any other day the game asks me if I want to delete my saves. "Why would I want to delete my saves? What possible reason would there be for me to delete my saves?" So I pick no. "Ok", the game says, "deleting saves now."

What!?

Slack jawed in terror I then watch as one by one my saves are all removed from the screen. Gone are my hours of progress. Gone are all of the boss fight triumphs and time traveling shenanigans I had taken part in up until this time. Gone. Gone. Gone. Had I still had a voice, I would have screamed. Had I not been paralyzed with the dawning realization that I had misguidedly answered "yes" to a question that never should have been asked in the first place, I would have thrown something at the TV.

All I could do was sit there and stare at the television thinking of everything I'd have to do all over again.

Then the screen went fuzzy and the game returned to the normal story. It was all a hallucination, one of the many tricks employed in the game to make the player feel the same sanity eroding effects that the game's protagonist did. My saves were fine, but for the rest of my time playing the game I had no idea what was real and what wasn't. That tension lasted until I beat the game and knew that from then on, if the tv went black, it was well and truly broken and not just some game designer at Silicon Knights messing with my head. - Brandon Cackowski-Schnell, Staff Writer

3. Freespace 2 -- The Alien; Interplay/Volition; PC; 1999

Towards the end of the campaign, there's a mission where you have to fly 'suicide recon' using a wing of reverse-engineered alien fighters behind their lines to see what's going on, while everyone else freaks out and evacuates like crazy ahead of the unstoppable alien onslaught.

The mission briefing makes things sound simple enough - you take your captured alien fighters, jump into an alien-controlled sector, look around, and then jump back out again after 15 minutes. So after confirming your weapons loadout, you get geared up for what should be a relaxing (if slightly tense) stealth mission, dutifully hit the "Commit" button to start the mission and -