Back when I was very young, like still in elementary school, I started playing Super Metroid for the first time. I was running around Norfair, generally having a good time, when I opened an innocuous-looking super missile door and encountered… Crocomire.

If you’re familiar with that game, you might be thinking “Oh, you got scared when Crocomire’s skeleton popped out of the lava, right?” No, I never even made it that far. Instead, on finding myself suddenly confronted by this huge, grotesque monster to a background of intense, blaring music, I freaked out. I didn’t even think of aiming for his mouth, instead just firing all my missile and super missiles in a blind panic as he slowly pushed me toward the spiked wall at the far end of the room. At the time, I didn’t know you could hurt bosses with the charge beam, so once I was out of missiles, I used the only other weapon I thought might work: a power bomb. Turns out that’s the worst possible thing you can do. Power bombs make Crocomire go apeshit, charging at you and quickly smashing you into the rear wall, at which point you’re basically guaranteed to die. Sure enough, I did.

I didn’t quit the game forever, but I did put it give up on progressing further until I was older, wiser, and generally better at video games. And even then, for years afterward, I played the Crocomire fight with the volume off.

  • LarsAdultsen [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    I dunno if “it wasn’t supposed to”, but the Bilbo/Galadriel ring scenes from The Fellowship of the Ring lived rent-free in my head and continued to haunt me throughout childhood

  • TupamarosShakur [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Courage the cowardly dog scared the shit out of me, but specifically there was an episode where anthropomorphic eggplant try to take over the world. I couldn’t eat eggplant for years after that, and I still mostly avoid it

  • CthulhusIntern [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    In Ocarina of Time, the scene after you get the Master Sword and walk out of the Temple of Time and see the ruins of Castle Town infested with ReDeads scared me so much, I didn’t play the game for 4 more years.

  • duderium [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    My sibling and I ran screaming from the room when my family was watching a presidential debate in 1992. We were about five and were convinced that Ross Perot was an extraterrestrial. Which, to be fair, he was.

  • KnilAdlez [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    There was a commercial for funding for PBS that ran when I was a kid, and in the middle it said something like, “If we run out of funding, the channel will go” and then the screen just went black. It freaked me out so much as a kid that, in front of my whole family, I stood up and turned off the tv before it got to that part. I just stood there and glared down my fam for about a minute before I turned the tv back on.

  • blight [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    The ending of Assassin’s Creed 2 where

    spoiler

    the camera zooms in on the goddess and she breaks the 3.5th wall and stares right into your soul

    • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      I was spared that by being really bad at assassins creed I never managed the tutorial mission where you have to race someone to learn the parkour mechanics I just kept losing the race and gave up in frustration. I wish there was an option to say “yeah I get the mechanic I’m bad at it though can I please move on with the game”

      That really annoyed me as I had saved up to buy the game and hate racing games because I’ve never been any good at them - comically so I was once playing need for speed at a friends house and I managed to be so bad at it I escaped the racetrack and got into the open world without finishing the race

      • blight [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Oh my god, I had the exact same problem on the parkour tutorial lol. Ironically all you have to do is keep holding the “run” and “sprint” buttons at the same time forever, and you will just automatically parkour up anything at max speed. Don’t know if you have unlocked it at that point in the game, but you should be able to just ignore the “race track” and climb up the church wall immediately. 10/10 game, def recommend giving it another shot

    • Mardoniush [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      That was creepy.

      If you’ve managed to catch The play that goes wrong they mention that their previous productions was, due to budget cuts…James and the Peach, and after an unfortunate accident in previews James…wheres your…peach?

      Oh, also, something seemed really off about Danny, Champion of the world as a kid that only became apparent to me after. I’d brushed it off as Danny being Traveller or Roma and then when I read it again as an adult realising, no, Danny’s dad is just kind of an asshole.

  • Drewfro66@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    I still remember getting so freaked out by the music in the Ocarina of Time Forest Temple that I had to put the game down. The ghosts and spiders didn’t bother me, but those ceiling hands did.

    I was going to leave the game running overnight to save my progress but the music made me so scared I had to turn it off, but I was too scared to touch the controller so I just ran up and shut the GameCube off

  • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    ET scared the living fuck out of me, especially when he was wailing in fear and trying to flee the feds while his chest was glowing. I had to leave the theater; was freaking out too much. madeline-scared

  • ikiru@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    There was a TV skits show for kids on Fox I watched as a kid in the 90’s, God knows what the fuck it was called, but I remember there was one scene with puppet animals playing poker in a dark room and I don’t remember the point of the scene nor why but as the different characters spoke it was very tense—probably for comedic effect that was lost on me—and then it just cut to the next scene/skit, but that bit remains stuck in my head as High Horror.

    Also, many old timey black and white cartoons creeped me the fuck out.