Doom 3 is now officially the second game that I've had to take a break from playing because it was too scary. The other one was the original Thief.

I wanted to play for several hours tonight because I'm out of town all weekend and I wanted to satisfy the itch before leaving. But I could only play for about an hour and a half before the intensity of all the scary stuff made me too jittery to continue. Thief got to me with its overall atmosphere of creepiness (Thief 3 only did that to me for one level), but Doom 3 has that creepy atmosphere *plus* all the cheap-scare moments. Individually, the cheap startles are no big deal, but cumulatively, they really get to you.

I think a big part of it was the immersive sound environment. I'm only using stereo headphones, but they're those Fontopias so they have really good bass response and they blot out all other sounds in the room so I get really immersed in the game. And there's enough 3d positioning cues in the stereo field so that I've got a pretty good handle on where the sounds are coming from, even if they're behind me. I've had more than one moment of distinctly hearing a growl from behind and doing a 180-and-fire-in-a-panic move. Boy it's been a long time since a game made me do that.

One of the rooms I entered was deliberately designed so that the sounds would get to you. There was a bunch of venting pipes and machinery, which were deliberately making noises that were hard to distinguish from the monster's noises. So I made my way through this room constantly getting startled by stuff that was just machinery. But then around that *next* column, bam, another monster. I'm now in the habit of cursing the level designers when they "get" me like that. Evil genius bastards.

Jumping in your chair, getting goose bumps, getting so immersed in a game that it produces physical responses... Not many games give you that.

If I can only tolerate an hour or two's worth of gameplay per night, it's going to take me a while to finish this game... I'm not even half way through yet. I'm told you get the BFG at about the halfway mark, and I don't have it yet...