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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 wish more games would take the 'more is more' approach to enemies that Serious Sam did. I loved the HUGE SCREAMING HORDES of bad guys that would try to zerg you down. It was a nice change of pace from, say, Unreal's 'kill a bad guy, which triggers another bad guy, because the engine chokes and dies if two mobs are on the screen at the same time'. And I liked Unreal. More games should have more swarms.
I'm a little concerned that the marketing has exceeded the technology here. The entire point of the SS games (as contrasted with SS2) was to swamp you with goons.
So... where are they?
The screenshots look purty, but if I were writing SS:FE:HD, then I'd start with a screen full of goons, and tailor the detail to keep the framerate up. Showing a couple of high detail models, wow, it's like they're demoing the exact opposite of SS.
I have a feeling that somebody's going to be working a lot of overtime to deliver on that promise, and it's not going to be the marketing guy.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Serious Sam was never about being the prettiest. We loved the first two because of the game play. You ran, you killed, and you either kept killing at a brutal pace or you were overwhelmed by the insane number of enemies. That was it. No complex puzzles. No crazy strategy. Just run and gun and have a blast. Nobody cared that the lawn was flat because we knew if there was a lot of detail, the game would never have run at all. Way too many enemies on the screen to have serious levels of detail.
Now, many years later, computers are faster, we have more memory and all that, but the point of the game hasn't changed. With SS2 they changed things and nobody liked it. For me the main problem was it locked up a lot. I didn't have that problem at all with the first two. I still have the first two and I'd much rather play them as is than prettier versions of the same thing.
Why not instead take the original engine and make a Third Encounter? And then a Fourth Encounter? We LOVED the first two and two more games just like those, different maps and what have you, but same exact style of game play, would be awesome!
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
This seems to be mostly aimed at console gamers who only got a watered down version of Serious Sam last gen (hence the HD buzzword which means nothing on the PC), also it's downloadable and thus cheap.
I don't think anybody called games like Street Fighter 2 HD lame cash-ins so why be negative about SSHD?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.