Yeah, the photograph scene was actually what I was thinking about. It works marvelously well for several reasons, in my opinion. First, because it gets you in a moment where you would expect to feel safe (a quasi-scripted investigation). Second, because after the initial scare, you're still seeing something incredibly disturbing. Condemned is such a brutal game. I love it.

But yes... having a horror movie or game based entirely around jump scares can get a little stale. You still need a good ambiance and creep factor.

Yeah, that scene, and another one from Condemned made me almost crap my pants :D

The other one was not scripted. You expect to find ammo and weapons in lockers, right? And usually, you do. And in that one, only one locker in entire game, there's a geek inside jumping on you and attacking :D

And yes, just like you said, what comes after the "boo!" moment is important too. In that scene with a geek in a locker it's a fight afterwards, with shaky hands :P

Amnesia is scaring the hell out of me :)

See, that's exactly the reason why I got scared ... Well, kind of spooked in FEAR and not in condemned - even with all the plotholes in FEAR, it kind of made sence. Condemned's story was just a bloody mess - I didn't believe anything that happened there, given the setting, it was even more over the edge than FEAR. My point? At least in my case, to build a frightening atmosphere, you first need to build up at least a bit beleivable framework to work with. I kind of believed the whole paranormal thing in FEAR, I 'got' it. But a cop clearing up his name by murdering hobos? Nah... Nah, doesn't work. Really, I'll never understand why it got so much praise.

Same experience here.

Running through picking off the guards then suddenly this large, mostly empty map with a door at the other end. Everything's calm until you open the door to find Hans, twice as big as the other characters and armed with dual chainguns. It was instant death for me the first time I met him.

Bioshock
Dead Space
Penumbra: Overture

POSSIBLE CONDEMNED SPOILERS

I completely disagree. Yes, the whole "the police force believes what they want to believe, so you have to go on the run" thing was a bit sketchy, but otherwise I felt that the progression from "relatively firmly planted in reality" to "completely and utterly insane" was masterfully done, and it helped drive the hunt for Serial Killer X along. I don't see what about it was any more looney than the plot of FEAR (seriously... just try summarizing it to yourself), and the fact that the combat actually aided in the overall atmosphere of brutality made the scares actually work in the game's favor rather than destroying the momentum as they did in FEAR.

But what scares you is a pretty subjective thing.

You were a cop. Murdering random people so he's not charged of murdering a single other one. I'm not saying FEAR was an epitome of writing, but at the very least they tried - you were a soldier investigating paranormal activity. Makes sense in the given environment. But it's like they didn't even try in Condemned.

They were crazed homicidal maniacs. It makes perfect sense that you'd fight back when they attack you with fireaxes and pieces of rebar :P. And the plot wasn't about you trying to clear your name IIRC, it was about you trying to solve the case you were originally given. Is it a little weak? Yes, it is. But if you ignore that, the rest of the story is actually quite good.

Yeah, just like in Max Payne entire franchise. Does it make MP plots stupid?

At least in Condemned, you are killing in self-defense.

Final Fantasy VII when you look inside the pods at the mako reactor how humans are transformed into monsters. I was like 10.

Terminator: Future Shock scared me a lot back in the day. Mainly because of the dark atmosphere, mood, setting, sound and art. It's creepy and i still don't have the gut to play it today.

I'm going to have to check out some of these games. The Suffering was one that was always on my list of games to get someday but I never did. I also played a little bit of Silent Hill 1 years ago and I remember really liking the atmosphere of the game but I never got around to actually getting a copy for myself.

Aside from some jump scares in many shooters I don't think there are any games that I felt scared by. There was some deliciously creepy atmosphere insome games like Doom3, The 7th Guest and Sanitarium but nothing I would really call scary. Games like Amnesia and Slender I just get bored playing, which is a shame because I was really looking forward to playing them.

The very first game that made me scream so loud that my mom thought I was dying: Clock tower for PS1. That's where my love for scary games came into play. It made me yell a lot!

Oh and the part from Bioshock; the dentist room.

There's more, but I'd be all day naming them.