Serious Sam 1 & 2

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Anyone else play these? Got them recently and they have been a blast. Well, mostly. Kinda just skipped to the second one first. :p I'm a bit worried that they're both gonna feel too similar now but whatever. Been playing the HD versions on Xbox Live so I'm not sure how they might differ from whatever other versions they have.

They feel completely and utterly ridiculous and that's just fine with me. Decent controls, no overused cover system or aiming down sights or going prone or the same old same old. Feels much more like an old school shooter, which I guess they kind of are technically, only the graphics aren't 2D sprites on a 3D plane so they don't make me get motion sickness. :p

The enemies are pretty hilarious, ranging from chainsaw wielding, suspenders wearing, big fat muscular guys with jack-o-lanterns for heads to suicide bombers with no heads and bombs for hands who scream indefinitely. The weapons used to take them down are almost always equally as insane. You're given loads of ammo, but you're probably going to need most or even all of it considering how many hoards of enemies will just spawn right out in front of you, most of the time in big, wide open environments. Never mind that there's a system almost similar to Metroid Prime's scanning feature that gives you detailed description of just about every little thing in the game.

So has anyone else had fun with these? Or want to share differing views on them?

I kind of liked the first one a little bit, but it got frustrating and tedious pretty fast. Tried the demo for 2, didn't like it very much.

I liked the console port though (which mixes First and Second Encounters together), they redesigned the menu/HUD, added a score system, and just generally made the game feel more arcadey. Obviously you can't use mouse and keyboard though, and there's some pretty bad screen tearing (at least on the XBox it does, seems to be better in progressive scan mode), it's too bad they didn't backport it back to the PC.

I tried the HD remake demo. It's pretty cool (though obviously not the same game), but the graphics seriously tax my system (one of the few games that does), and turning down the graphics just makes it look really ugly. I've heard the full version has an "advanced" menu to fine tune everything, weird that they wouldn't put that in the demo.

I remember those games got absurdly difficult on the harder difficulties, that the console ports even had lives (Not sure about the PC version, only played it a bit.).

But I think that's why I like it, besides the obvious humor.

It spawned a 3rd game as you probably know. But it also spawned Double D and The Random Encounter, which are funny and challenging in their own right.

I used to play 2 when I was younger.