What is it that makes these fuckers so scary?

What? What does that have to do with anything? What matters is he has it on and he's the only one with a suit like that in the whole game.

He has it on, but you said that he "has" it. It's not his to have.

Accuracy is important, user.

They have a look of a tarantula's head with 4 legs with the movement of Half Life headcrabs with the unpredictability of The Thing from the movies. If they can go further and evolve as much as the Thing from the movie, they'd be unstoppable and be a far better game than the actual The Thing game.

It's all presentation.

The first time you encounter them they spontaneously leap at you but otherwise they are not particularly scary, yet. Then you see one riding some dude where their heads should be and controlling them like puppets at some point, then a scientist screaming in agony as one of those little fuckers is doing something to his face as part of the scenery is something you'll witness as you explore the various levels amongst other things. While all that is going on you just recently got out of the cascade event so you're quickly and rapidly thrust into a chaotic situation.

barnacles are scary cause a couple of them are sneakily places at a height where you'd rapidly die horrifically before you even knew what's going on.

But he's wearing it. Although without a helmet his ability to survive headcrabs is a mystery.

Speed, small size making them difficult to hit, ambush tactics, pack hunting and the fact they look like spiders something most people have a hardwired aversion to.
While the HLs are widely overrated they make a great case study for enemy design.

Unsettling animations and reasonably good sound design.

it was explained that in the first game, he had the helmet on and thus were able to survive headcrabs

in the second game the main writer actually said 'dont think too much about it'

The decision to leave the helmet off in HL2 was clearly driven by "we have cool facial animation, don't cover it".

You don't even see his face in 99% of the game.

they stop being scary once you realize they are even easier to kill than regular headcrabs, since they stop for a moment and make a loud noise before they jump.

Still die in 1 hit from a crowbar like all the headcrabs and are kind enough to give you a free moment to give them a smack.

I just trained myself to stop being afraid of them by making a conscious decision to kill every type of headcrab only with the crowbar.

What kind of autism is this?

you don't see his face at all

I could swear you see it for a second at the end. Maybe it's been too long since I've played. Sure though, hundred percent. So there's no reason for him to not have a helmet.

Good point, I forgot he's a mute and there isn't a single 3rd person shot.
I wonder why they left if off then?

they're black, like niggers

no, you dont see hit face at all, by design. It is played all from Gordon's perspective.
In fact they wanted to hide the real appearence of Gordon from the player and ALL up to the players imagination. I dont remember exactly why, but it was something about multiplayer and cover art.

The regular head craps are more frightening.
They stick their dicks in your brains, mutate your body somehow, and then make you scream backwards.

They didn't, O2 is part of the auxiliary power bullshit. Gordon also doesn't instantly die from barnacles biting on his head. HEV helmets in the first game look like they give you a wide field of vision, so you can't see the helmet but it is there.

They rip off a lot of aesthetic from the face hugger, and those things are fucking horrifying.

Nothing.
They're the weakest enemy in the game, you'd have to be a complete faggot to find them scary.

If I steal your car, then I have it. Even if it isn't mine, it is still in my possession

If you are going to be petulant, at least be correct.

Fuck these guys.

Why do they sound like donkeys?

They're jackasses.

Why is HL2 enemy "variety" so pathetic?
You have humans with guns that you fight 90% of the game, humans with claws and headcrabs, and if you're careful enough in the sand levels, you don't have to fight antlions at all.
What the fuck happened to all the bizzare enemies from the first game?

Walking close-to-instinctual-desire-not-to-lose-health trigger with a distinctive audio cue, in a form that can be easily hidden so as to maximize the panic of tracking it down before it can take away all your health.

Gone the way of the rest of the beta content, down the toilet after being scrapped for no clear reason or because they couldn't show it off after that source-code leak.

He doesn't even have a complete model.

...

It's because they make a high-pitched scream before they jump at you, so you know they're coming, and they set you up for an instant kill from something else thanks to instantly reducing your HP to 1.

This sort of shit never fails to amuse me.

Assuming Opposing Force is canon, he doesn't have a helmet in the first game either because when you see him jumping into Xen teleporter he doesn't have one IIRC

because they look like spiders and humans are are biologically programmed through natural selection to avoid spiders

That type of headcrab reminds me of a golden orb weaver spider.

It has that same type of marking on the back. A spotted/dotted white cross.

I think they look kind of cute, personally.

I never thought those things were scary themselves, but thanks to the environment they're in they're scary. IIRC they always appear in dark, secluded locations and you see most of them in Ravenholm chapter, which is already scary thanks to the design anyway. I don't think they'd be really scary if they were in more open chapters, like Water Hazard or something

That's no Golden Orb Weaver, search says it's likely a Labyrinth Orb Weaver. Still cute, though. I'm only being pedantic about this because you never forget what they look like when you walk into one of their gigantic webs on accident.

They're black and hairy, so they look like spiders. The flesh coloured ones don't create that association.

why are spiders so goddam scary

"Touch"
Now you will die if you so much as get sneezed on.

Evolving in the vicinity of poisonous arachnids that'll kill you and eat your baby will do that.

jesus christ I never realised until I saw the concept art how badly fucked up the parasitised humans were

What kind of pussyass nigga is scared of them things? Nigga, it's a CHICKEN.

Do we have any articles and documentaries which hint that our ancestors we're having an arachnid war back millions of years ago and we were scared shitless of these death insects coming into our homes.
I mean you don't see the fear of mosquitos being as common as arachnophobia.

I don't see how an arachnid can be more scary than a hungry jaguar,lion, leopard, tiger.

I assume the reason he's modeled in HL1 is the multiplayer.

Fear of snakes and tigers is pretty deeply ingrained in us too. There's probably a developmental element to spider fear as well, you don't really grow up watching your mother freak out whenever a tiger wanders into the room.

Maximum grade autism?.

When's the last time you found a hungry jaguar or lion in your house?

...

If they were any larger then they would be dangerous.

why live?

this

normal headcrabs are 100% jumpscare. They sound kind of pathetic and they look dumpy. fast headcrabs are the same, just with more urgency to kill.

poison headcrabs sound like 4 different scary things; the squeaking of a mouse, the rattle and hiss of a rattlesnake, the high pitched human scream and whipping noises. Mice aren't very scary but we generally have a natural disgust for them. Snakes are an instinctual fear of. People screaming is unsettling, and nobody likes being whipped. Oh, and they look like spiders, drop your health to 1, and have all the jumpscare elements of the other headcrabs.

Normal head-crabs look too silly and do too little damage to be threatening. You're also desensitized to them early on in Half Life 2 since they're used comedically before you fight one.
Poison ones on the other hand look like a dangerous spider instead of a whole chicken, they're far faster than regular head-crabs, they make more threatening sounds sounds, and they're extremely dangerous despite not being able to kill you outright.

Why live?

theyre essentially mules, carrying cargo

They have poison and they're a bit annoying.

I guess we'll see him in small claims court then

...

...

He's just a pair of arms and a camera. He's not even wearing a helmet.

Headcrabs were scary in the sense they fucked your shit up if you let them but those things that grabbed you in the sewer made shit more intense than any headcrab could.

im so scared

They've already mentioned them
You're just too retarded to either read the thread or know their name.

Am I the only one that just doesn't get scared anymore in games? It takes going back and playing old shit like Afraid of Monsters to even get creeped out anymore.

Try Cry of Fear in case you liked Afraid of Monsters, if you haven't played it yet.
But yeah, I feel you. It's hard to feel anything nowadays at all. The last time I really got into the in-game setting was when I was really fucking sick and instead of lying on my bed getting some rest I was playing Dark Souls. The feeling of hopelessness and all that really got me.

I forgot that existed, holy damn I remember not even making it through the apartments before quitting.
Last time a game that wasn't a mod scared me was fucking F.E.A.R.

Barnacles were never scary, they were almost incredibly annoying, though.

Maybe it's an age thing but I remember being more "imaginative" about video games when I was younger. For me it was unnecessary for a game actually feature something for me to think that there is something.

As an example, from the top of my head, the first Portal was like that. Which is also the reason I absolutely hate the sequel.
You wake up God knows where and the first thing you hear is some emotionless robotic voice that glitches once in a while. You have no way of knowing what date it is, how and why you got here and whether or not this voice talking to you in real-time or it's a series of pre-recorded messages. There are no other sould in the whole game but you. All chambers are sterile-cleen with rare splats of brownish liquids of unknown origin on the walls. All the rooms behind the glass are empty with left-overs of people who should be there but for some reason are not. The only glimpses of outside world you get are these rare places where you can step out of the chamber and see behind the scenes. And what you see there is far from a pretty picture. First of all, the lighting: all test chambers are lit with blueish and white light, while the backstage of Aperture has this evil orange color everywhere. Next thing are the writings on the walls with mad messages and the fact that everything is so dirty and unorganized in contrast to everything you've seen before…
And… I can continue forever. When the game came out I was so invested in the in-game setting and lore behind it without having any of that really fed to me by the game itself. Most of this stuff came from my head. The only other thing that was feeding my imagination are fan-made modifications and custom maps that have some kind of story that tries to explain stuff (fan theories).
And then Portal 2 came out and ruined the canon.

I'm gald my brother isn't like his friends from school (and now college). These people grew up without using their brain to come up with anything themselves. You can argue that Minecraft is all about being creative but in reality, for some reason, kids who spend hours in it building some fucked-up red-stone machines are far from being creative.
Don't really want to sound like an old fart but when I wa a kid and had no money to go play some Counter-Strike 1.5 in a computer cloub I was playing "real-life" Counter-Strike with sticks and rocks. And insted of making shitty blocky buildings in Minecraft I was learning how to use Hammer Editor without even knowing English language just so I could make some maps for Half-Life 2 to play them myself and maybe show my friends if they're good enough.

Nowadays I tend to think that the less polygons games have the more player's imagination is involved in the game. Not literally but you should get me.
In Super Mario Bros. you had to use your head to see that this pile of pixels is a person. In DOOM you had to use your head to see that these four perfectly flat walls form a room the purpose of which is something other than just being an empty space for you to kill demons in.
When the graphics are so good that you can't tell a photo from a render not much thinking is required to understand what's what.

In conclusion, I think same goes for the horror in video games. You have to come up with something yourself using the information the game gave you to get some real spooks out of it. For me, Cry of Fear got much more scarier as soon as I started to imagine myself in this situation instead of being interested in the actuall story of the character I was playing as. Even gave me a bunch of nightmares.

In my case it was not knowing you can use the gravity gun primary fire to kill them. Yeah, you can use a shotgun scrub, but the gravity gun's auto-aim makes it piss-easy.

obligatory .mp4

Not sure if it's an age thing either, but I barely knew how to read English when I first played Fallout 1 at about age 8.

I thought the whole point of the game was to just kill everyone. Enter a city, shoot shoot shoot, loot loot loot, scoot scoot scoot (to another city).

So my first playthrough of the game was a pretty mindless grind where I admired the pixellated aesthetics. Was pretty cool, I picked up on the old west + disaster vibe pretty quick. I thought building a town out of junk seemed like a pretty rad idea, and wished people would come visit me after I cleaned out junktown.

The game was also fun once I was older and could read, but it lost a bit of its charm. And the 3D Fallouts are just terrible; nothing left to the imagination, so obvious it's "just a game".

At this point it's a fact that 2D Fallout games are not even comparable to 3D Fallout games. But in defence of Fallout 3 I want to say only one thing: I really liked the dungeons in this games. Or, to be more general, dungeons in all games from The Elder Scrolls series.

In case of Fallout 3 they were really comfy and atmospheric, especially thanks to how much little details they had. Stuff like some skeletons lying in some werid position and especially audiologs made them feel nice.

Obviously, you can dig deep and ruin the whole magic but when I was playing the game for the first time I was not thinking about that too much.

Spiders are friendly, and loyal to their job of eating other insects.

...

spiders A CUTE
A CUTE!!!

are you a fucking retard?