Let's face it - if you've been gaming for as long as I have, it's quite likely that your first exposure to a game that threatened to actually make you change your underpants was Resident Evil. And if there's one area in Resident Evil that is more likely to have actually made you need to change your undies than any other, it was one of the most infamous jump-scares in video game history: when the dogs break through the outside windows and into the narrow hallway. Even if you suspected something was going to happen, you walked down the hall, and nothing did. It wasn't until you walked through it again that you heard the shattering of the glass, and the two bloody dogs made a beeline for Chris or Jill and made you jump so badly that you dropped your controller. If you were really unlucky, you had to make some excuse about going to the bathroom for a minute, after which you zipped off to your room to snag a new pair of tighty-whities and tossed the old pair into the laundry hamper. This also had the added effect of showing that unlike most previous games, the boundaries that the player's character were constrained to were not applicable to the bad guys. In Pac-Man, both Pac-Man and the ghosts couldn't move through the solid walls of the maze. In Resident Evil, however, it rapidly became clear that just because Jill Valentine couldn't break a window and jump into the zone on the other side, this in no way affected a monster's ability to do just that. When bad guys don't play by the "rules", this increases the stress level on the player, who now must take into account things that he or she didn't have to worry about before the event. It's a dirty trick, and gamers absolutely love falling for it again and again.

Ever since that moment, horror video games have been relying on a technique perfected in cinema decades earlier: the jump-scare. The concept is simple. The characters on the screen, having been lulled into a false sense of security by the goings-on around them, are suddenly assaulted by something that comes right out of left field. And because the audience has been identifying with the characters this whole time, when they are scared, the audience shares this reaction and shares a bit of the fear as well. Video games, building their techniques for storytelling on Hollywood, have followed this path. The only problem is that video games, like films, have adopted a number of rules over the years that make it possible for fans to see a potential event coming a mile away.

Consider that in a standard horror film, if someone sees a sharp instrument like a pitchfork hanging on a wall, it's a no-brainer that at some point during the ensuing carnage, somebody is going to get impaled on the pitchfork. In the same vein, if the camera is tracking with a killer shark underwater, swimming for some frolicking children in the ocean, you can be pretty certain as an audience member that some unlucky sod is going to lose a leg at the very least. Likewise, in video games, it's getting harder and harder to surprise gamers with a jump-scare in horror titles. Thus, when it is executed effectively, a video game jump scare is something of a pleasant surprise to me. And the earliest example I can think of in my own personal experience with thinking I was smarter than the game came from another one of Capcom's horror classics, Dino Crisis.

In Dino Crisis, the player takes control of Regina, a special operative who is part of a team sent to inflitrate a science compound on an island and to apprehent a scientist named Dr. Kirk. Kirk has been working on something called "Third Energy," and unbeknownst to the team at the start of the game, his experiments have produced a very, very terrifying result: the Third Energy singularity has phase-shifted the island back in time to the era of the dinosaurs. Essentially, the island now occupies two points in time simultaneously, and the installation and the surrounding area has taken on the properties of the past. This has resulted in it becoming infested with dinosaurs, which are more than happy to stalk and kill you, and Regina finds herself fighting for her very life as she searches the base for Dr. Kirk in the hopes that he can somehow reverse the process.

At one point early on, Dino Crisis plays havoc with your nerves by showing that the rules you learned playing Resident Evil will need to be re-learned. The velociraptors are not zombies: they will happily scale fences, leap over obstacles, and even open doors in order to get at you; in short, they will hunt you down and there are no such thing as safe places. And you know, from Resident Evil, that monsters are going to break windows. It's just inevitable. So when you're walking down a hallway, and the camera shifts to show you from outside, with two large plate-glass windows between you and the exterior, everything instantly goes on full-alert. Those stupid zombie dogs got you the last time, and you'll be damned if Capcom fools you a second time. Heck, you can even hear the snorting and snuffling of the raptors walking around outside, and you walk through the hallway, gun drawn, muscles tense for the confrontation you know will be coming any second now...

...and you walk through the hallway completely unscathed, with no attackers and completely unharmed glass. You open a door, move around, explore a bit, and nothing ever once comes through those windows. So you laugh to yourself, seeing exactly what Capcom did there: they put those big windows in the game knowing that it would stress the hell out of you to walk by them, and even made it seem like the raptors were just on the other side, waiting to get you, and then nothing happened. Evil, evil, evil. They got you again, you chuckle, give them a mental nod for managing to creep you out, and continue on with the game.

Everything is, in fact, hunky-dory. The problem is that by the time you have to retrace your steps through that corridor, you've managed to brainwash yourself into thinking that Capcom pulled one over on you, and you don't think about it anymore. Which is why when the two raptors blast through the windows and run at Regina, you still crap your pants and while Regina is running for her digital life you realize that Capcom has gotten you a second time with the same gimmick. The bastards...

But Capcom isn't finished. Not content to merely scare the effluvia out of you with the "smashing window" gag, they realized that they could only grab a player with that once. So the next time around, they have to top that. Regina, in this case, has just beaten the group of raptors congregating in a waiting room-style lobby, and walks into the interior office, confident that nothing is going to follow her. Inside, she finds a badly-wounded scientist, who managed to lock himself inside the room to escape the raptors. He's lost an awful lot of blood, but he can still talk, and Regina gets him to spill his story rather easily.

Of course, just as things get interesting, and Regina is listening to the guy chatter away during a cutscene, Capcom pulls their second dirty move of the game and introduces an entirely new rule: now, not even buildings are enough to keep you safe, because a T-Rex's head smashes its way through the wimpy drywall, snatches up the scientist in its jaws, and proceeds to try and make mincemeat out of you while you have no way of running away from the beast. You manage to pump enough lead into the T-Rex to make it rethink its plans to make you a second appetizer, and finally it retreats with a defiant roar. At which point, the smell hits you and you realize that it's once again time to change your underwear. This is getting both disgusting and expensive, and it's right about now that you consider never picking up the controller again and just leaving the console all alone to collect some dust while you compose yourself.

You won't, of course. After all, you're a gamer, not a quitter. But the thought still manifests. Capcom got you again.

The bastards...