Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter XBLA Review

I remember when the first Serious Sam game came out on the PC, it created quite a stir and I was told by a lot of people to give it a look. I never took that advice, something about the screenshots and other stuff I saw  just didn't click with me. When Serious Sam was released on the XBLA I remembered everything I had been told and picked it up, played a couple minutes of it and turned it off. This was years ago, "I have retail games to play" I thought, as if the way you gain access to a game has anything to do with it's quality.

120 gig is so small these days!

With the release of Serious Sam 3 I was reminded that I have never properly experienced this franchise, I still put it off. Then one day my 120 gig hard drive was full, no room for even a save game. I had been buying  all kinds of XBLA games when they appeared in the Deal of the Week. This was when it was decided something had to be done about this situation, and I focused on completing and then removing these XBLA titles to once again claw back some space. It has been a long process, and is the reason I've played and reviewed almost exclusively XBLA titles, I have to thank this decision for finally getting me to commit and play through Serious Sam HD: TFE.

Overview
Serious Sam HD: TFE is a fast paced arcade style shooter. If you're not running and gunning you're more than likely dead. There's just enough story to give a reason for the crazy you see running head(less)first at you and for you to be there mowing everything down. This is B-Grade camp at it's gory finest, explosions, lasers, bullets and gibs. You play the titular Sam, who is very very serious about saving earth from the never ending onslaught of thousands of ridiculous alien monsters who want nothing but your annihilation.

This part in particular was one of the hardest for me the first time I encountered it

You'll run through every level, shooting anything that moves and trying to stay alive. The first run through I played on Normal and even then the game is not easy, with the hordes of enemies you need to face down. After a while you learn how each enemy reacts and what the best tactics for dealing with them are but when you are swarmed with hundreds of them, knowing what to do is half problem, pulling it off successfully is another thing entirely.

Rational
Serious Sam managed to through these hundreds upon hundreds of enemies at you without any performance hit what-so-ever and it really amazing sometimes with the sheer number of things moving about on screen. The enemies wildly vary in both their looks and attack patterns which keeps you on your toes every encounter. Sometimes just scraping through a seemingly never ending wave of Kleers with 7 health left is a win. It throws all these enemies at you at breakneck speed too, with every enemy type not hesitating to take you on. The break into a full sprint the second they notice you and you had better hope you have the dexterity to shoot and weave your way through and out of trouble.

Sam comes across a wide range of weaponry as you progress through the missions, with most being useful throughout the game in different situations. Experimenting will help you find which gun seems to work best for which enemy and while it's entirely possible to turn on infinite ammo and just stick with the one, learning how to deal with what you're facing in the most efficient way possible raises your chances of survival immensely.

You can't hide from the onslaughts you'll regularly face!

Serious Sam is a game meant to be played with liberal use of the state save and load feature, and that is not lost on the Xbox. State save is mapped directly to the Y face button, with loading happening when you die or through an option in the start menu. It's a great way to implement it on a console and is a life saver, especially when playing Serious difficulty. I was saving after every enemy kill in some firefights, and while in some games these would be close to cheating your way through, in Serious Sam it's almost expected.

Summary
Serious Sam is great fun if you're willing to get into it. It's simple, but that's the point. It's also very challenging on harder difficulties, but every time you clear a stage you get a real sense of accomplishment when you look back and realise how often you just scraped through most of the firefights. Multiplayer is a blast, with you and your mates running roughshod over the even further increased number of enemies thrown your way but unlike single player you have an unlimited amount of lives which removes a lot of the challenge. If you've never played Serious Sam before I would recommend giving it a try, if you have then I can say the Xbox 360 version is a quality remake and playing it with a game pad and voice chat is a lot of fun.

Fridaily Update

Hope all my fellow Australians had a great ANZAC Day, I know I sure made good use of my time. I managed to finish up two games and most of a third I started last night.

Serious Sam: The First Encounter was the first to be wrapped up nicely with the help of a friend who knew exactly what he was doing. We made it through in record time with explosions and flowers flying everywhere. Flowers because I had Hippie blood turned on as the achievement Co-op Hippie asks you to complete the last stage with it, it was a colourful change after the three other solo runs I did with normal blood. Co-op was a blast and super easy as you can die as much as you want and constantly spawn back in exactly where you left off. Completing the campaign in co-op took just under two hours and resulted in the three achievements I needed to complete Serious Sam: TFE. It was a great start to the day.

Red Dead Redemption rides off into the sunset that is my DVD shelf

Next I couldn't really decide what I wanted to play next, and saw Red Dead Redemption was still sitting in my disc drive so instead of wasting time I thought why not just grind out some more levels for a while. I ended up doing that for most of the day but in the end I reached level 50 and passed into legend, sacrificing my rank for the last achievement I needed. It was a bitter sweet moment as I deleted the RDR install and DLC expansions from my hard drive, I was happy I had finally completed it but also sad as now I probably won't play any Red Dead Redemption for a long, long time.


Red Dead Redemption is up there as one of my favourite games I've ever played on the Xbox. Before deleting it I spent some more time in single player, roaming the country side and unlocking the last two outfits I needed by playing a whole bunch of Five-Finger Fillet, roaming around for ages looking for snakes to kill and skin and killing a cougar with a stick of dynamite amongst other things. After getting the Savvy Merchant and Expert Hunter outfits there was nothing more to do in my game and multiplayer, while fun, isn't what I really liked about RDR, so it has now retired from my Xbox almost a whole three years since I first played it.

After looking through my XBLA list one more time I decided on giving Crazy Taxi a whirl. It's been a bunch of stupid fun so far and I've managed to grab all the Arcade and Original mode achievements which leaves me with the Crazy Box. Crazy Box is a set of challenge missions that are a lot harder than any of the fares you drive around in the actual game, so this could end up becoming quite the challenge. I'm gonna see if I can wrap it up today, and get another completion under my belt this week.

That's all for this update, two more completed games to review, along with Deep Black, so look for those reviews in the upcoming weeks. As always leave a comment, and I'll be back Monday.

Wednesdaily Update

Wednesday rolls around just as I managed to finish up Serious Sam: TFE on Serious difficulty last night. I only just managed to squeak through the last boss battle, but a win is a win and my shiny new Serious Sam achievement proves it. I honestly thought this achievement would really put me through the wringer as my first play through on Normal had me in some tough spots but once I was half way done on Serious things just seemed to fall into place and the last half of the game seemed a lot easier than the first.

I was following a secrets guide so I also managed to get the Look, It's a Secret achievement for finding 50 secrets in a play through so I'm left with one single player achievement that I will hopefully grab tonight. It's looking like a hard one, but after some looking around there seems to be a couple of easier ways to go about it so I'm hoping Metropolis King won't take too long. Once I grab that, it's down to the last three multiplayer achievements and I have found a couple of guys that have said they'd be willing to give me a hand so it shouldn't be too long before this is all wrapped up and ready for review for you all!

Cut the Rope was a fun distraction, lets hope Experiments is more of the same

Other than Serious Sam not too much has been going on, I grabbed Cut the Rope: Experiments on my Windows Phone because they dropped it to 1 dollar and I enjoyed the original Cut the Rope. I haven't really been playing my Windows Phone much lately but I may get into some of that in the future. Tomorrow is a public holiday here, ANZAC Day, so I'm not sure if I'll post the review of Deep Black: Episode 1. Come back and have a look but I'm guessing you'll just have to wait until the Fridaily Update. Leave a comment and see you guys later.

Mondaily Update

Sometimes walking away from a huge firefight with
7 health is a win!

Monday is here, hope everyone made a bunch of progress in whatever they were playing. I had a fairly busy weekend, which included a couple of outings, some training, a little bit of boosting for the first time in ages and a lot of dying. Dying can be the most infuriating thing in the world, but also serves as incentive to get it right the next time. Maybe there's something wrong with me but I can't seem to walk away from a game when it's all going bad, I need to push through and show my Xbox who's boss.

Since last update I've been slowly working my way forward in Serious Sam TFE. The save system is a godsend in this game, with every encounter on Serious difficulty running the very real risk of being your last. I've been following a secrets walkthrough this run to make sure I grab that achievement when I finish and to make sure I get every health and armour pickup I can to make it just that bit easier. Except that it doesn't seem to be making much of a difference. I've made it to the back half of the game and things are only going to get harder but I'll do it, oh yes! It'll happen Xbox, you'll see.

Part 1 of 1 it seems...

Apart from Serious Sam, I took some time on Sunday to bust through Deep Black Episode 1. One of my regular boosting buddies grabbed the game and seeing as it had four online achievements that can be attained real quick, so we got them while the getting was good. After wrapping the multiplayer achievements up in 30 minutes I decided a break from Serious Sam could be good so I continued playing through Deep Black's campaign. It's surprisingly decent for a game everyone seemed to overlook completely and it's made me a bit sad because I doubt Deep Black Episode 2 will ever be developed. Just like Amy, Deep Black cuts off without wrapping up it's story and let's you know to keep an eye out for Deep Black Episode 2. If/when that happens I'll gladly go back in for another look, Deep Black isn't good, but it's interesting and has some new ideas.

I shouldn't get too reviewy here, look for a Deep Black review Thursday. Tomorrow the review for Joy Ride Turbo should go live so check that out too. Leave a comment below and I'll be back Wednesday, hopefully you will to?

Fridaily Update

Aaaannd it's Friday again. The weeks seem to be going by faster and faster since I started writing this blog. Last Update I filled you guys in on me beating Joy Ride Turbo, the review will go live Tuesday next week. Since then I tossed up between starting a number of games but ended up deciding to follow through and play Serious Sam The First Encounter.

Serious business!

I've had it sitting on my hard drive for years now, and I had a real quick look at it when I bought it but didn't click with it right away. I also hadn't popped any achievements yet so I thought I'd shelve it and play something else. Since starting it yesterday I've managed to run through it twice and grab the lions share of the available achievements. Coincidentally they are also all the easy ones, so I'm left staring down the harder ones. I've started another run through on Serious difficulty to try and grab the last couple of single player achievements I'm missing before I'll need to track down a co-op partner for the last three.

If you want to help a brother out leave a comment below and I'll get in touch. It has to be done in one sitting and will take about 2 to 3 hours. That's a lot to ask some random on the internet but you'll have my gratitude and a shout out on this blog. I know a couple other people that may help so I'm pretty sure I'll wrap Serious Sam TFE up sooner rather than later.

Seriously crazy!

That's all I got for today, hope everyone enjoys their weekend and gets plenty of gaming in. Leave a comment and I'll see you Monday.