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Serious Sam Remake Coming In Fall
Majesco Entertainment has announced that Serious Sam: The First Encounter HD will be coming to Xbox Live this fall, and to the PC sometime later. It's a remake of the original game using the CroTech engine, and it will support up to four player co-op. Joystiq has some screenshots, including a comparison between the old graphics and the new look. "The textures are sharper and cleaner than before. The original's perfectly flat lawns are now replaced with individual blades of grass — and look at that foliage, rendered with some classy Crysis-styled soft focus. Notice the dynamic shadows over our pumpkin-wearing, chainsaw-wielding friend? Now, imagine this level of detail on hundreds of on-screen enemies."
I hope they only touched up the graphics, and didn't mess with the gameplay at all. SS:FE and SS:SE were just great games, I had a lot of fun, specially in co-op. For SS2 they made changes to the gameplay, to make it a bit more "modern", and that didn't work out at all. So I hope they left the gameplay as it was.
And what made SS2 such a disappointment? Numbers of enemies. Simple as that. Screw graphics and pretty, I want to be swarmed by mindless, soulless, expendable goons to mow down. THAT is Serious Sam! Let the killing be in the 1000 BPMs (bodies-per-minute).
And for god's sake, gimme more than 4 people to play with. 8 was already great. 16 would be awesome. 32 would be just too awesome to not flood the keyboard with ... erh ... coke. Me and my buddies take on the world. Ain't that what every blood-lusting boy dreamt of?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Hmm... back in the day Serious Sam WAS pretty. It was one of those games that would push a TNT2 or Voodoo 3 to the limits. It was the Crisis of the late 90s.
Not even close to being better than SS1+SE. It suffers from consolitis.
We've been seeing this decline in the games industry for years with the ever-increasing numbers of derivative sequels and even different titles from different companies being copies of each other.
The "remake" is exactly the way Hollywood has gone with movies - now they've all run out of ideas, they just redo the old stuff.
Incidentally, these comments come from a big Serious Sam fan - I still play the First and Second Encounters regularly on LAN parties with friends, it really doesn't need any graphical improvements. Especially because having a few older PCs kicking around the house, it's not always necessary for friends to bring PCs over themselves since one of my older PCs will run it (as well as Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake and a few others).
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.