There are also pre-baked finishing moves that can be activated when you're close enough to some enemies, but thankfully they're incredibly brief and don't break the flow. But then they start introducing all the colorful and interesting monsters from the good old days and the gray soldiers seem more and more weirdly out of place, like someone's dad at a Limp Bizkit concert. And when an early repeated enemy is a generic, gun metal gray soldier with hitscan weapons who's kind of hard to spot because of dull environments and perpetual dust clouds, then I'm already picking out what shovel I'm gonna use for the shallow grave. So when a Serious Sam game starts with a helicopter crashing in a ruined city and the first thing you do is run around some narrow corridors, one could be forgiven for thinking that there's been another casualty in my stubborn, heel-digging war against modern gaming.
He's dropped into present-day, war-torn Cairo to find information on how to work a time machine, and he's the only one who can be trusted with the job because he's SERIOUS! All the other candidates run around wearing tutus and fight the aliens with giant inflatable hammers. The game even starts with Sam being transported to the battlezone in one of those standard video game helicopters with the wide open doors on both sides that crash land if they're so much as elbowed by a passing mosquito, the standard " Apocalypse Now cold open" sequence.įor the uninitiated, Sam Stone is a nineties action hero graduate from the Duke Nukem correspondence course with some kind of unclear role in the military and who started showing up to work one day in a customized T-shirt and jeans, and no one wanted to complain in case he blow cigar smoke in their face or shagged their mums. Serious Sam now wears a pair of douchebag wraparound shades and occasionally everything has to stop so he can have some embarrassing dialogue with one of his Skype friends that was written with the care of a cat knocking a bowl of jelly beans onto the word processor keyboard. So technically I suppose this would be several thousands years after first encounter, but that's time travel for you, doing to simple, linear storytelling what energetic sex with a contortionist does to a smoothly laid out bedsheet.Īnyway, Serious Sam 3: Bum Fondling Enjoyment doesn't quite make it through the washing line of modern gaming without a few pairs of moist underpants clinging to its face. But longtime viewers will know that the games industry doesn't call back to that sort of thing anywhere near often enough for my tastes.īFE stands for Before First Encounter - not, as I had first believed, Big Fucking Egun - and is a prequel telling the story of Earth's doomed war with the alien armies of Mental and how Sam was first transported back in time to Serious Sam 1. Serious Sam 3: BFE is a deliberate call back to the retro Doom-style of FPSing that the original Serious Sam (and I suppose Serious Sam 2, but we don't really talk about Serious Sam 2) was also calling back to. Fortunately, in the world of Serious Sam, anyone who is not Serious Sam or one of the entities that talk in his earpiece every now and again has a role in life normally associated with industrially fattened flightless birds during the time between October and January.
One person up to their eyeballs in Martian badger guts is a desperate struggle two people up to their eyeballs in Martian badger guts seems more like an allegory for the average first marriage. I guess a certain amount of magic is lost for me if I have to share the genocide with anyone else.
Somewhere along the line, that became "large numbers of people who are different to me get killed in single file by a nebulous military force (that may or may not involve a playable character), with various slight variations on the theme of 'bullets' and 'missiles fired from some kind of orbiting armchair.'" "Large numbers of evil monsters get killed en masse by a lone, underdog soldier with a different exotic murder device strapped to each extremity" was the perfectly functional, workaday formula. It really is quite instructive how much people managed to fuck up the simplest formula in gaming over the years. One of these days I'm going to make of list of everything shooters lost sight of in the first decade of the millennium after they wrapped a big sheet of HD whale blubber around their heads.