This post has not been edited by the GamesBeat staff. Opinions by GamesBeat community writers do not necessarily reflect those of the staff.
Everything about that night is still vivid.
The humidity was cloying. The air was too thick to breathe, heavy with honeysuckle and lilac. It was late and it was June; the heat wave rolled in midweek and just hit its peak. Nighttime brought no relief. In a few days it would break in a storm, but that night the sleepy suburb felt like a jungle, tense and pregnant with hidden, hunting things.
Perfect to set the mood.
I was thirteen. I would graduate from grade eight in two weeks. It was Thursday, and even though my parents were with me it was still thrilling to be out so late on a school night.
I didn’t walk to the theatre — I vibrated, and admonished my parents for their mid-life leisure. Mom told me to calm down, which just showed how distressingly old she was. She didn’t get it. This was important.
When we got there, the theatre was quiet. We settled in to an interminable wait. This was before pre-show commercials disguised as slideshow trivia; before tweens and texting and twitter. The Internet was this new thing that tied up your phone and made entirely of bad typography.
Everyone remembers childhood in a certain way. I think of all the things that weren’t there. I remember it as a quieter time, a simpler time — in some ways a better time. Which just confirms how distressingly old I am.
Finally, the lights went out. The butterflies in my stomach turned to bats. Here. Now. It was about to happen.
Titles faded in, each accompanied by a resounding thud, like the footsteps of something giant, and hungry.
Universal Pictures Presents
An Amblin Entertainment Production
Jurassic Park
Monster Hunter Tri is survival horror.
It doesn’t look like it — there are no demons or ghosts or manifestations of repressed sexuality. There is no gore. It is colourful and well-lit, for the most part. I am armed and armored; I have enough potions to teach a class at Hogwarts. I am prepared in all the ways traditional survival horror doesn’t let a player be prepared.
And yet, when that Royal Ludroth spots me, roars at me, comes charging across the map like a freight train of teeth and claws and aggression, I am suddenly and deeply afraid.
It doesn’t last long, but those few seconds are some of my most treasured in gaming.
The Royal Ludroth is tough. He is the largest of all the beasts I’ve encountered so far, and the hardest to maneuver around. I gather my wits in time to dodge his charge, barely; when I turn back he hits me with a face-full of water. I stagger. He readies.
I shoulder my Hammer and book it. He runs into a tree. I double back. Seconds, at best, to line up a strike. I make contact with his spongy yellow mane. He roars. I wind up for another swing but he rolls at me like a mud-bathing crocodile. I am airborne, until he catches me with his tail. Then I faint.
Cats cart me back to base camp and dump me in the dirt. But I am not beaten. If anything, I am better prepared to try again. I know him now.
I still feel it, though, the next time I find him: that cold, sharp drop in my stomach when the beast sees me, and knows me too.
Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Shitshitshitshitshit! Oh my God. I hate dinosaurs.
When the Tyrannosaurus Rex attacked two children trapped in a car, I realized my biggest fear in life is being eaten.
It is unlikely to happen. I don’t associate with bears, sharks, or cannibals. But when that massive, toothy jaw dropped through the roof of the car and all that stood between helpless kids and bloody, crunching death were a few inches of plexiglass, something changed. I was scared, more scared than I had ever been watching a movie.
It stayed with me. The humidity was terrible after the cool, dry theatre. Tropical. Jungle-y. Just like Isla Nublar. I walked ahead of my parents again, but I wasn’t excited. I was humbled. Every rustle in the hedges made me think of raptors; I scanned the trees for menacing shapes.
Genetically engineered dinosaurs were no more real than Freddy Krueger, but that didn’t matter. On some level my reptile mind believed in them. It remembered a time before suburbs, before minivans and multiplexes, when the dark would eat you.
That summer I went to see Jurassic Park five more times.
Nature is scary. Indifferent, inscrutable, dangerous — you can’t reason your way out of the food chain. You can fight to the top, though. For someone who once could believe there were dinosaurs lurking in the dark of a quiet suburb, Monster Hunter Tri can be an empowering experience.
But the hard win isn’t why I love the game. It’s the fear. Fleeting, and surrounded by whimsy, but vivid as memories of a hot summer night being thirteen, excited and scared; a time that now seems precious for all the things it wasn’t. Monster Hunter Tri lets me relive that bracing dread; the moment I first learned something primal.