I feel like the logs only work for telling a story in the past tense, if that makes sense. Like, you're working your way through some area where shit already went down and you're trying to figure out what the nature of that shit was, if you get what I'm saying.
Like, right now I'm playing through Marathon, an old (and criminally-obscure) Mac game made by Bungie as an answer to Doom. It tells its story through text-based terminals scattered throughout the level. I feel really detached from the alien invasion that's supposedly happening around me. I get plopped down in a level, and yeah, there are aliens, but they don't really feel like they're invading. They feel like they belong there. Being told that "alien forces are trying to overload the generator" or whatever doesn't mean much when I see a couple aliens chilling around the generator, not doing a thing to overload it or whatever. Saying that there have been thermonuclear strikes on the Tau Ceti colony doesn't mean much if I've never seen the Tau Ceti colony.
Of course, some of this has to do with the technical limitations of the time. This was, after all, a game that came out in 1994 and, if I'm reading these specs right (this was before my time), could run on a Macintosh II (1990) with a memory upgrade.
But the ones that work best are the ones that are past-tense records, like Terminal 3 from the level "The Rose" (minor spoilers; scroll down a bit, I can't link right to it). It's hidden in the game, and shows the attitude of Durandal, one of the game's major characters (though you haven't met him yet, only heard about him second-hand), and reveals a bit more about what he's up to.
It's still a good game, though. I don't want to sell it short. I guess now would be a good time to link to downloads for the Aleph One source-ports of the game and its sequels. They're free to download and work on Windows, OS X, and Linux. (And this isn't like a Doom source-port or something, where you still need the original WAD - this is the whole game. And yes, it's legal and approved by Bungie.)