Kid me hopping from wolfenstein at home straight to doom 2 at mom's office, first level, ok it's kind of like wolf just a bit darker and the dudes look a bit different ok, then turn the corner and all of a sudden this giant freakin fireball flies into my face out of nowhere! That is not like wolf! Wolf is all guns and hitscan, only one boss of the one horror world had projectile knifes, so I was terrified to face whatever it was that had projectile FIREBALLS with just the pistol and a handful of ammo. I run back into the corridor wait for the fireball to pass, quickly run out, frantically shoot into the darkness and go back in before the next fireball (I don't yet know how to strafe in these games). If I run out of ammo I just load the savegame right before that room. Eventually the fireballs stop and I carefully sneak into the expansive room to find out what it was. In the opposite corner I find a cage, and in it a weird brownish mangled corpse of something definitely not human. The thing was caged and still scarier than anything I ever seen in a game before, so what will happen if it's free? I didn't get to play much more of doom 2 at mom's office, but from then on I had the distinct association of horror with that game, and that's why I'm one of 3 people in the world who think doom 3 is a good game and prefer it to the reboot.
Teenage me doesn't know how to properly exit penumbra cause I'll just alt-f4 out of it every time. Have yet to solve the first non-trivial puzzle in that game. Look, I'm ok going through a maze of horrors, but having to backtrack in a maze of horrors to find something? That's just too much to ask of me. These days I pretend I just don't have time to get back into it.
Adult me boots up eye divine cybermancy just to test a new speaker setup, having unbeknownst to myself swapped the left and right channels. It's a comfort power fantasy game for me not scary at all, but the first monster that you're supposed to just one-shot and move along drives me into total panic, as I see it before me and hear another one BEHIND ME! I didn't know first level had random spawns! (but I believe it cause most later ones do) So I'm shooting all over the place, even taking some damage from that one guy that will never otherwise happen and after finishing him off was still mousing around like mad for a few seconds looking for the other one before taking a moment to realize what happened. Gained a new appreciation of spatial audio that day to say the least.
