Why Halo scares me.

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People always ask me why halo scares me. The answer usually astonishes them, though why it does, I simply cannot understand.

I have two reasons why I will never look at a halo game.

1: I forget what those machines are called, I think might be called halos, and thus the game namer. All I can remember is that it was a machine that was supposed to destroy all life in the galaxy when activated.
The concept of destroying all life everywhere was so disturbing to me that I it took me a while to get it out of my head.

Even worse is reason 2: (which is strangely enough the one that people laugh at the most)

The Flood. and probably not for the reason you think. while the concept of a ravenous, out of control monsters that want to eat everything in the galaxy (or something like that, I don't really know much about the story) is terrifying enough, the thing that really scares me is that I'm pretty sure that in some cases if the flood eats you, you become flood yourself.

I remember one night I was watching my brother play halo 3, and he was going through the wreck of a ship that had been destroyed by the flood. In the background, a wounded NPC moaned something about having been injured by one of his comrades, after said comrade had been infected by the flood in some way that I can't quite remember. as the PC leaves the room, the same guy can be heard screaming in terror about "his eyes! they WEREN'T HIS EYES" or something like that.

Just seeing that shook me up so bad, I had a near total emotional collapse, and had to sleep with the lights on. At the age of 13.

This is sort of a reoccurring theme, in my life, although halo is the most drastic example. One game I played when I was a kid featured a magical plague that behaved like that. I had no trouble playing the game, but the start menu opening cutscene (which had better graphics than the rest of the game) gave me nightmares for months.

The treasure of El dorado from the original "Uncharted" game, drake's fortune, has a similar theme

Interestingly enough though, I do not seem to have this problem with books.
Jim Butcher's "The Codex Alera" series's main antagonists are a species called the vord, who fit this (if you will permit me to use the word) trope, exactly, and while I consider some of the scenes in that series to be incredibly disturbing, I still love the series as a whole.

looking back on the issue, It seems a bit like I my issue with this might stem from a fear of conformity.

Thoughts?

A fear of conformity? Well that's a new one for me. But then again, I'm a guy who's afraid of any spiders, so I guess I shouldn't talk. But I can understand being afraid of the flood. That whole "Get converted to a shambling, mindless automaton" thing is part of the reason zombies scare me so much. Don't feel ashamed or anything. It's perfectly normal to be scared of those things.

P.S: The idea of all life everywhere getting wiped out isn't so appealing either.

I was pretty young when I first played Halo Combat Evolved, and the Flood scared the s**t out of me. I literally could not play missions with them unless I convinced myself they were merely potatoes that ran around (weird but w/e, that's what they look like). I never even managed to finish the game, after the 3rd or 4th mission with them I freaked out too much and stopped playing. Now that I'm older I think they're cool, and love missions with them. They're like zombies.

There are games that have stories with weirder methods of wiping out galaxies and universes...

Everyone handles things differently. So this isn't your cup of tea. There are plenty of other great games out there.

Personally, I never thought of the flood as scary. Then again, I started watching R-rated horror movies at the age of 6.

The Flood are pretty scary in concept. In most cases it does not even kill the host, first is tap into the nervous system, then tunes into the brain waves, then it puts its own will into the mind of its victim. It then symeltaniously mutates the cells of the body, at early stages of infectation it absorbs the knowledge and shares it with any nearby Flood before useing the body and gained knowledge to get more victems, It has even been known that victems can well be aware of what actions are hapening. At higher levels the network spans into one hive mind, likely comparable to a very large AI, any Flood within a large area is part of it's mind and that mind is even more intrusive.

Halo is one of my interests, and I even used the Flood in a highschool assignment where I compared it to the extremes of comunism, with the desire of ultimate greater good, where free will and strong emotions are sacraficed for what could even be a utopia. Well I myself always get a bit spooked by the Flood levels with the loss of visibility, creepy voices/noises and general swarming.

Well, GamerNerd, for someone who never played the Halo series, you nailed the essence of the three main games better than a lot of people I know who have.

Backstory: Some tens of thousands of years ago, a race known today only as the Forerunners pretty much owned the Milky Way Galaxy. Then they ran into the Flood - which feed on sentient life of any sort, and propagate by taking over some of the corpses and turning them into either members of their race or incubators for more of the little infection-forms. In the end, the Forerunners were reduced to a few outposts. In desperation, they decided there was only one way to get rid of the Flood - get rid of what the Flood eat. The Halos were built as amplifiers for a wave that would kill every higher life-form in the galaxy.

Fast-forward to the beginning of Halo: Combat Evolved. Humanity has penetrated the galaxy in FTL craft, and found artifacts of the Forerunners. Then we found the Covenant, an interstellar, multispecies religious group that worships the Forerunners, and sees any modification of Forerunner artifacts (something we humans did as a matter of course, to use their tools for our own purposes) as blasphemy. Thus began the War - the Covenant seeks to stamp out us Heretics, root and branch. (It doesn't help that we, and they, find out that a Forerunner artifact is buried on Earth, and that we wound up building the New Mombasa Beanstalk over it.) A Covie fleet is chasing the frigate Pillar of Autumn, which is forced to drop out of hyperspace in a previously-unexplored system, which features a massive ring-shaped arcology in space. Another attack, and the Pillar is forced to crash there. While searching for the wreckage, the Covies inadvertently stumble across a place where Flood infection-forms had been stored, possibly for study, and unleashed them in ignorance of their life cycle. By the end of the game, you have to keep the robot in charge of the facility from activating the Halo weapon system and wiping out all sentient life in the galaxy again, while simultaneously keeping the Flood from leaving the Halo and keeping the Covenant from finding the location of Earth in the Pillar's data banks...

Uhg, the Flood. I love the games, except the levels where you fight the Flood.

just my opinion... i the flood scare you... never play silent hill... that game will make you drop bricks.

Horror movies and Horror Games are a whole different thread

But sufficed to say, you couldn't get me to play any horror game, (let alone something like Silent hill) at freaking gunpoint.

From what I have read about Silent Hill, you could get me to play it. But you would have to pay me a lot, and you would also have to pay for a shrink.