Games

[icycalm]

Original review thread: http://culture.vg/forum/topic?f=11&t=3551

Review: http://culture.vg/reviews/in-depth/seri ... 01-pc.html

And this concludes our FPS thematic week here on Insomnia. Next up: "Indie" abortion thematic week.

In the meantime I'd be interested to hear impressions/comparisons, or see trustworthy links of such, between this game's original version and its remake, since I'll be giving it a go at some point to see how I feel about Worm's comments, and will have to pick a version.

[Tain]

After playing both, I'd suggest the remake. The assets are much nicer, the map layouts seem identical save for some smoother terrain here and there, and the game wasn't degraded in any way that I could notice.

I'd love to hear Worm's thoughts on Serious Sam 3. From what I've played, it looks like it fixes the checkpoint pacing and level design problems of the original.

[Worm]

I've read that there are a handful of areas with weird physics that couldn't be recreated in the new engine. Here's confirmation from a Croteam member, and although he says it's just one room in The Second Encounter, the next couple posts mention examples from the first game. Other than that, the remake is supposed to be nigh-identical, mechanically.

As for Serious Sam 3, I haven't paid much attention to it. Although I stand by the score I gave The First Encounter, I was ready for a long break from horde after horde after horde by the time it was over. I'll probably at least try The Second Encounter at some point, but unless I hear something amazing about it or the other sequels, I'm in no hurry.

[icycalm]

Hey, a decent thread on The Ghetto:

http://www.the-ghetto.org/forums/index.php?topic=84.0

I finished both of them in co-op. It was a blast. The Second Encounter was much better. Better level design, more weapons, more enemies and the competitive multiplayer was pretty good too.

The last part in TSE was fighting a huge number of enemies that kept spawning for 20 minutes in a huge field before going in the courtyard of a cathedral (I think it was a cathedral) with a friend to finish the game.

Excellent game. I also remember playing it in co-op with about 6 people at an internet cafe. It was obscenely fun.

I was surprised by the mention of co-op for the first two games, which Worm neglected to mention.

Serious Sam features cooperative gameplay, something that was not common among first-person shooters of the time. Besides network/online play, Serious Sam also allows for split screen action supporting up to 4 players, a rare feature for PC games (though very common in console games).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_Sam

And this came out a few months before Halo, which as far as I know (Rare games aside, which I don't hold in much esteem, admittedly without having played them...) was the first FPS to do co-op right.

[Worm]

I didn't try co-op. Serious Sam's style of combat seems perfect for it, but the default settings are infinite respawns and the same number of enemies as single-player, so I'm sure it takes a bit of designing by the players to keep things from getting boring.

However, this sounds cool:

The other co-op mode is called Coin-Op Co-Op which adds a unique twist and difficulty to the game's single player. Your team of X players has only a pool of 3 lives to use, and once those are up, it's game over. So if you have 8 players in co-op, only 3 can die and respawn before you start losing your teammate support. Thankfully along the way you'll be able to earn extra lives to keep the action going. In a way this is an interesting solution the default co-op mode, which almost makes the game "easy."

http://www.co-optimus.com/review/472/se ... eview.html

It's only in the Second Encounter remake, though, not the first.

[icycalm]

I didn't try co-op. Serious Sam's style of combat seems perfect for it, but the default settings are infinite respawns and the same number of enemies as single-player, so I'm sure it takes a bit of designing by the players to keep things from getting boring.

If these are the "default" settings, then there have to be other settings, right?

As for the Coin-Op mode, it sounds amazing, but it sucks it's not in the first game, and I presume also not in 3?

That site, by the way, is the most interesting gimmick site I've seen.

And here's some cool artwork I found (and made a header from to replace the one previously in your review):

It really captures (what I presume to be) the spirit of the game. Too bad it's heavily compressed, and I can't seem to find a better-quality version of it.

This is now the thread for both First and Second encounters, by the way -- and the remakes and fan-made extra missions, of course.

[icycalm]

There is also a Serious Sam Advance for the GBA (FPS again), and Serious Sam: Next Encounter for PS2 and GameCube, all made by Climax. The GBA game appears to be original, but Next is basically a port of the PC games with some new levels and "also support for vehicles", whatever that's supposed to mean; and finally there's Dark Island, a fan-made expansion pack that was released officially as part of Serious Sam: Gold Edition. More info on all of these here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_Sam

[Worm]

If these are the "default" settings, then there have to be other settings, right?

The number of respawns can be set from 0 to 200 (or infinite), the amount of extra enemies can be a flat percentage increase (0 to 400%) or up to 200% per player, and there are a handful of yes/no options, such as friendly fire.

As for the Coin-Op mode, it sounds amazing, but it sucks it's not in the first game, and I presume also not in 3?

It's in 3:

You have several options for co-operative play. There’s Standard, which gives each player 3 lives per level before they must spectate. Classic allows everybody to respawn infinitely, and Coin-Op grants the entire team only 3 lives to share. Don’t like any of these options? You can set up a custom game and control everything from whether enemies scale to the number of players, player respawn counters and even the grace period in which a player is invulnerable post-respawn. Oh, and infinite ammo.

http://www.co-optimus.com/review/949/pa ... eview.html

[Worm]

Here's a better-quality version of that picture, which is apparently the box art for the Second Encounter remake:

http://images.wikia.com/seriously/image ... ounter.jpg

It has the title and Croteam logo, but you can still use it for that header. Though I should point out that it's definitely a Second Encounter image, as the pumpkin dudes and reptilians don't appear in the first game.

I found the art for the First Encounter remake in decent quality, but it's not nearly as good:

http://bulk2.destructoid.com/ul/142891- ... oscale.jpg

[Qpo]

The HD remake of The First Encounter is vastly different from the original.

As Worm mentions in his review of the original, the sound of some enemies work as a sort of "global alarm signal", leaving it up to your eyes to actually spot where they are. This is at its most intense with the bombers, which are always a priority to take down before they get close — but in the remake they are mildly stressing at best, since you hear exactly from where they're coming. I'm not sure if you've got no directional hearing at all in the original, or if 60% of the volume is the same between both ears leaving only 40% for giving you direction or something — it's hard to tell, as when you're moving around you'll be hearing a sound from multiple positions and triangulate where it's coming from, and when you already know where an enemy is your brain attributes its sounds accurately to that position — but whichever the case, due to the radical improvement in directional hearing in the remake the two versions are like night and day.

In the remake the bulls kick up WAY more dust than in the original, actually blocking your sight every time they run past you, fundamentally changing what it's like to fight them. There's also a new "layer of redness over your eyes" every time you take damage, and while it is good, unfortunately the lens flare effect is pretty similar, sometimes making you feel like you suddenly took damage out of nowhere. Enemies are redesigned slightly, e.g. the skeleton horses now having sharp, bright eyes, instead of the original dumb-looking empty sockets. I prefer fighting the dumb-looking ones since being killed by them provokes me more.

But what drives me NUTS in the remake is how you get spammed with "HINT: PRESS F6 TO QUICK-SAVE AND RUIN THIS GAME!!", which I found no means of disabling. For the game itself to tell me to do this I by the roots of Yggdrasil can't make the slightest sense out of — I'd say the FIRST thing to do before even pressing New Game is disabling "auto-save", and the second is to never quick-save, as either will completely butcher the game into vapid mini-mini-mini-levels without any sense of danger.

There's also this weird hang-time when you jump in the remake, but yeah, while the Serious Sam 3 Engine that the remake uses has clear improvements (e.g. staying in first-person when turning into a corpse), having played the original extensively I just felt that everything was wrong in the remake, so after the first two levels I switched back. (I've yet to clear the game, by the way.)

In sum, I recommend the original version since the combat is more intense when you have less directional hearing, which some waves are clearly designed with in mind, and also since the original isn't constantly urging you to ruin it by quick-saving.