by Qpo » 10 Nov 2013 01:09
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.