Our new reviewer Mark Williams, Jr happens to be awesome when it comes to graphics, so he’s given us a new site layout, as you can see the background has been applied to the main site as well as this Blog.

Mark will be helping big time on the site both with writing and site layout and big things are going to happen on the site in the future.

Now I have some help I can really push this site forward, after the fanboy bullshit on the big sites (I’m looking at you n4g.com)  I really think smaller genre led sites like this can give the visitor a safe haven against the tirade of little boys arguing over who’s console is better.

We are all about video games that are made to scare you, and although we have plenty of competition, I truly believe we can make it as one of the premiere genre sites on the net.

There are NO fanboy bullshit comments here, all we do is review scary games, give you access to video clips, music and much more, we are constantly building, stick with us, trust me, we’ll still be here when all those other sites have bit the dust, thanks.

And again, a special thanks to Mark who is a seriously valued contributor to the site. If you think you have what it takes to post news/reviews etc. Then send me a message, the more the merrier, let’s show ‘em how it’s done.

Please welcome our newest member to the Game Scares team; Mark Williams, Jr who has just sent us his first review for the brand new section of the site ‘Movies’.

This section will include reviews for films that were inspired by scary video games, to be fair most of them suck, as do most game/movie tie-ins, but Mark’s first review is for ‘Dead Space: Downfall‘, an animated film that helped flesh out the Dead Space universe and wasn’t bad at all, I am a big fan for sure.

I’d like to personally thank Mark for his time and excellent writing skills, he is a very valued member of the team and you can look forward to more of his work from now on.

Having extra team members sending in such quality material is not only good for the site, it gives me more time to promote and add new features, reviews really do take a lot of effort and time.

So please give Mark a big welcome, comment on his articles and give them a good rating, its nothing less than deserved, thanks.

I’ve been dying to get a chance to have a look at these new 3D-TV’s and today me and my bro went to a local store where they were demoing them, to say I was blown away is a massive understatement.

We didn’t get to see any games unfortunately but there was a rolling demo featuring a white water raft ride and hot air balloons floating across the sky, I swear down it looked like the balloons were actually OUTSIDE of the TV and you could reach out and touch them, I’ve never seen anything like it, we were literally there with our jaws on the floor.

This is the future, and I WILL be purchasing one very soon, I just can’t wait to see what they do with video games on them because the immersion factor will go through the roof, the demo we saw with a cam fixed to the front of a boat white water rafting really hit home how good driving games could be *drool*.

Its hard to put into words what the experience is like for those of you yet to try it out, but forget the old red/green glasses where things were meant to pop out at you… but never did, this isn’t like that at all, its all about depth, you can see layers into the screen with foreground images literally jumping out of the TV and the background gives the feel of actually standing there in real life looking into the distance, it is quite incredible to behold.

We both had to admit though that after we took the glasses off we had a bit of a headache, this only lasted a minute or so, but still it could be a problem, however I was hung over so I guess that didn’t help, I’ll have another try fully sober and fresh and see if the same thing occurs….

Overall they are fucking awesome, MUST….HAVE…..ONE.

There will be upcoming benefits for registered and contributing members!

I’m working on a system whereby after so many forum posts and comments on site articles you will have access to a password protected directory whereby ALL soundtrack mp3′s and video files will be made available for you to download.

I get stupid amounts of email asking how to download the soundtracks and videos so I’m going to make it possible, but you have to put a bit of work in.

Once you hit the criteria (which will be fully explained in a future update) then you will be sent a password to a protected directory on the site that gives you access to download the files.

Keep checking back I’m building it right now.

As you may have seen from the extended post on the main page I’ve now added a feature whereby if you simply click the ‘Connect With Facebook‘  button at the top left of the main site menu and input your email and password for Facebook you now have full access to the site.

This gains you full access but takes away the chore of using the site login page and having to input data, wait for an email verification then log back in before you can gain access.

All you need now to gain FULL access to the site is to hit that button, log in with your Facebook details and the site is open to you.

This should make it a LOT easier to get people contributing, Facebook is huge after all and most of you use it, if you don’t you can still create an account as normal using the ‘Login/Out’ link in the main menu.

Implementing this was a bit of a chore to be honest and I’ve had to heavily edit core code to get it to work, but it’s all good practice for me and I hope to see many new users contributing to the site, it really is easy now to gain access to the site.

I’ve also modded the ‘Features’ menu link so when you click it there will be a drop down menu for quick access to site features.

Also my review of Alan Wake has been deemed good enough to be posted on Remedy’s official review page on their forum.

See you in the next one, we are getting more hits by the minute, thank you to all our dedicated visitor’s, we have much more to come, stay tuned.

I was never a fan of giving a score for my reviews, they don’t really convey in any real regard as to the quality of the game, at the very least they are a mere vague assessment that many people skip the article text and simply check the overall score to get an idea of if they should give the game a try.

But I’ve had to bite my lip and get on with it, purely for the fact that I have been ‘advised’ by certain game creator’s/distributor’s that a score is needed for advertising their product, to be blunt, if I don’t give a game a score there is no chance I’ll ever get to have my review published or quotes used when it comes to promoting a game.

And seriously, I’d love to get my website out there when it comes to promoting video games, this hit hard when I was told by the developer’s of the awesome ‘Heavy Rain’ that they wanted to use a quote of mine for a promotional video for the game after it hit the 1 million sales mark, but alas they couldn’t because they needed my overall score for the game to go with it, gutted…

Anyway to avoid that in future every game reviewed on this site will now come with a score out of 5 at the bottom of the review, in big red text so you can’t miss it. I’ve added a score for every current review on the site and will for all reviews in future.

Now I’ve seen the score there on the reviews it does look pretty cool, so hopefully I can now get the Game Scares name out there for promoting upcoming games, I just hope you still actually read the reviews as well!

I’ve been notified by more than one visitor that even if you input the incorrect username and/or password when logging into the site you still get a message telling you that you are logged in.

This is a bug and shouldn’t happen, I am aware of it and am working on a fix, however as long as you input the correct username and password you will still have full access to the site, however if you type anything wrong when logging in you will still get a message saying all is ok, it isn’t, and you will soon realise when you can’t auto post comments or post in the forum etc.

What should happen is that if you input the wrong information you would get a link asking if you had forgotten your password and wanted to be sent a new one, until I fix this bug that’s not going to happen.

Until I fix this, if you have forgotten your username/password for the site, email me and let me know your username, I’ll then reset your password and send you the new log-in information, you can then manually change your password.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to clear up a question that I’ve been asked a few times before, although I own the website, the system that handles passwords is unavailable even to me, and passwords are stored in a highly encrypted algorithm, I CAN NOT see your password, I can merely reset it, same goes with pretty much every other website out there, personal information like that is yours and yours alone.

Sorry for the confusion, I’m working on it.

It’s taken me a month (I was on holiday for two weeks since it was released) to get all the achievements for Alan Wake and it’s DLC meaning I now have 1250 of 1250 points for it.

This is a bit of a bragging post but hear me out, there are seriously not many games I could give a flying fuck about getting every single achievement, but when a game like this comes along I use getting all those points as another reason to put that disk back in the Xbox.

I guess doing things like this is all dependent on how much you like the game, I’ve got all achievements on the arcade release of Doom, which included beating all levels on the ‘Ultra Violence’ difficulty setting, and a few of my friends have asked me how the hell I pulled that off.

“Simple” I tell them, I grew up on that game and know the levels like the back of my hand so no matter how many enemies get thrown at me I know where to go and what’s coming next, admittedly playing it on that difficulty setting without having played it before is gaming suicide, but that’s the point of this article, if you love a game and it makes you think about how to tackle the next section when you are at work/sleeping/having sex (sorry ‘the mrs‘, ah she’ll never read this anyway) then that is when video games are doing their job.

There are not many games where I will collect over 200 ‘things’ or complete ridiculously intense sections without dying just to bump up my gamerscore, but with Alan Wake it actually added to the gaming experience, it made me play the game more than I would have without the achievements.

Remedy need commending for creating these achievements, they made the game last a lot longer for me, in fact to get all these points I’ve been through the game at least 3 times and the DLC twice in a month.

So many developers miss the point when it comes to achievements/trophies, take note of what Remedy have done, yeah some of them are hard (completing ‘The Signal’ without dying was absolutely heart poundingly terrifying) but keep them to a level where they are attainable and not just hard for hard’s sake and us gamers will play your games a lot more.

Anyway, bring on ‘The Writer’ DLC for Alan Wake, there is no way now I’m going to let my flawless gamerscore fail for that game, just do what you’ve done Remedy and we will stay mates, cheers.

After an awesome two week holiday I return to find… Well I haven’t really missed much in the video game world have I? All the fanboy sites are banging on about Kinect (yawn) and who is winning the console race (double yawn) and there really hasn’t been much else released about scary games after E3.

I’ve only been back a day but have added an exclusive interview with Jason Graves who created THAT soundtrack for Dead Space, interviews always go down well and the game has a huge fan base so hopefully some of you get something from that.

I’ve also cleaned up the arcade system, the code was messy in displaying tag clouds and stats for the game being played so instead of trying to fix it I’ve simply got rid of it, it looks much better for it.

I’ve also been contacted by a fan of the site who wants to help out, thank god for that I really didn’t think any of you were reading the message I’ve posted under the site title, maybe the text is too obscure and small? Hmmm I’ll look into that.

Anyway, thank you Mark for getting in touch, he’s sent me a sample of his work and it is excellent, writing, graphics and web design are all just what I’m looking for so get ready for his first article any time now.

With two of us going at it the site will move a lot faster believe me, so stay tuned.

In case you hadn’t noticed I’ve been updating the site a LOT this week with news reports from E3, of course a LOT of other sites are doing the exact same thing but remember for all your scary game news you’ll find it all in one place right here.

There has been plenty of new footage of Dead Space 2, which is looking amazing, as well as Alan Wake DLC ‘The Signal’, I expect more of that at some point, and I’ve literally just been sent a link to the debut trailer for the new Silent Hill which I’ve now posted on the site.

There is plenty going on in scary game land at this years E3 so please keep checking back all this week as we cover it.

Stepping out of scary game land for a second, my big hope is that Bethesda announce Elder Scrolls V, I doubt they will but we have to keep hoping!

I’ve got my minions out there sending me anything scary game related from this years conference but if you have anything to share that we haven’t posted please get in touch, thanks.