I’m a PC Gamer at heart, and I always have been.  I also spent about six years running a local LAN party group in my home town, so a lot of my fondest PC gaming memories are from LAN gaming.  Serious Sam occupies the fondest share of my memories.

Serious Sam is a shooter in the classic Doom/Wolfenstein vein.  In other words, you kill shit.  No quests.  No plot to speak of.  You just kill wave after wave of hilariously messed-up monsters.  There is something very cathartic about looking at a wave of hundreds of dudes running at you, and then firing a cannonball at them and watching them turn into gib gumbo.  It really never gets old for me.

That’s right, I said a cannonball.  Screw lasers and beams of holy energy and giant world-ending bombs, Serious Sam’s ultimate weapon is a medieval style cannon that fires cannon balls the size of a man.  These cannon balls roll across the battlefield, crushing whatever poor bastard has the bad luck to get in their way.  The rest of your weapons are pretty much standard FPS fair: Shotgun, Chaingun, Rocket Launcher, and a crappy pistol with endless ammo.  However, the guns in Serious Sam just seem to feel right for some reason in a way that they rarely do in other First Person Shooters.

But the best part of this game is the multiplayer coop.  Up to eight players can play through the game together, and the game multiplies the number of monsters accordingly.  This makes for some ridiculously huge encounters later in the game.  The sheer amount of adrenaline created by doing this in the same room with seven of your friends makes for one of the best experiences you’ll ever have at a LAN party.  Especially some of the ridiculously huge bosses you encounter in the game.  The game also doesn’t punish you for dying in multiplayer, choosing instead to keep it fun by allowing you to immediately respawn near the rest of the group.

And the environments you explore with your comrades are quite varied.  The first game ranges from jungle to mayan pyramids to medieval castles to volcanoes.  The music also reflects the environments well, despite the fact that Serious Sam one of those games where you really wanna crank some Heavy Metal while you play.  There is also some occasionally snarky humor, which brings a smile to my face every now and then.

I wish other FPS games were more like Serious Sam.  In the present era of Halo and Gears of War and Killzone, I really feel like the genre has gone to this strange place, a place where utterly ridiculous plot conventions are just accepted as Gospel from The Good Lord Himself.  In past generations, gamers would have rolled their eyes at these plot elements as they grabbed their mouse and keyboard (because that’s the best way to play FPS games), but now they are not only taken seriously, but those that still have the old attitude are openly mocked by the rest.  Serious Sam doesn’t take itself to seriously, and I think it’s a much better game for it.  When I play a game like Halo or Resistance, I find the overly-serious nature of it to be a little…off-putting.  When I play Serious Sam, I know the game’s designers are laughing with me, and that makes the game that much better.

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites