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Tuesday, January, 26, 2010 |
SS HD Four-pack for the Price of 3 Games - Gimli - 1:18 PM - Comments - Link to this Item
Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter is being offered as a four-pack on Steam for the price of three games. Here's the official news post from Steam:
Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter is now offering a four-pack so if you've been itching to play with your friends this is the best way to do it as you can gift out your extra copies to your buddies!
Don't miss out on this unique opportunity!
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Sunday, January, 24, 2010 |
Prophets of Sam Release Serious Sam Forever Multiplayer Demo - jasser - 1:34 PM - Comments - Link to this Item
Prophets of Sam have released the multiplayer demo of Serious Sam Forever.
Prophets of Sam announces Serious Sam Forever Multiplayer Demo!
"After nearly four years of development and over 1000 revisions, many rewrites, and nearly starting over," John Turner began. "Phase one of Serious Sam Forever's development is over!"
"We are announcing the completion of the Multiplayer Demo featuring four maps, four game modes, and four hundred bots--given the right hardware conditions--on the twenty-fourth of January, 2010."
"The highlight of the demo, the multiplayer AI Bot system, is unparalleled in any time period and will give new and long-time players alike a fun new way to experience Serious Sam! Play alongside human and AI players in some of your favorite game modes like Capture the Flag and Deathmatch!"
"The team presents this gift to the community in the hopes of sparking a few million more hours of serious fun. Be sure to post videos of your exploits!"
You can download the Serious Sam Forever Multiplayer Demo from here or here.
Serious Sam Forever is a total conversion mod for Serious Sam 2, so dust off your Serious Sam 2 disc, download Serious Sam Forever and start fragging!
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Friday, January, 22, 2010 |
New SS HD Patch Brings Demo Recording - Gimli - 4:05 AM - Comments - Link to this Item
Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter has received another update with more bug fixes. It also adds the demo recording feature. Here's the official changelog posted on Steam:
Updates to Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:
- Demo recording and playback added.
- Works in single player, on server and on client.
- Can record demo segments while playing a demo.
- Recording started from menus, or using F7 in game.
- Hud shows current recording or playback status.
- Cutscenes cannot be recorded - recording is automatically stopped when a cut scene is encountered.
- Changed the alignment of all table items in the join game menu from centered to left aligned.
- Some widgets in CPU performance customization options were not functional.
- Leaderboards menu now supports double click on leaderboard players for details.
- 3rd person view mode now persists when respawning.
- Bullet fly-by sounds were sometimes played for the wrong player.
- The rocket model in the first person RL weapon would sometimes dissapear/flicker. Fixed.
- Fixed flashing crumbs when prebaked lights are used.
- net_fConnectionTimeout was not honored by the "Connecting" progress screen, thus limiting it to 10 seconds of its hardcoded value.
- Fixed possible timing issue with sounds that have their pitch set too high resulting in unsupported frequency by the sound HW and/or API.
- Sound mixer frequency can now be 48/44 kHz or 22 kHz if cvar 'sfx_bLowSampleRate' is set. (Cvar 'xad_iMaxSampleRate' has been deprecated.)
- Fixed crash inside XAudio2 when sound HW supports sample rates higher than 100 kHz.
- Master sound mixer frequency (sample rate) and speaker config are now reported to console at startup.
- Better sound mixing performance of XAudio2 under sound boards that support very high sample rates (more than 48 kHz).
- Enabled DirectSound and OpenAL sound APIs. To change the current API, adjust sfx_iAPI and restart the game. Note that those APIs are not officially supported.
- Fixed boss bar not being shown in some rare cases.
- Fixed problem with crosshair sometimes being rendered wrong (flickering).
- Fixed problem with having too many occlusion queries under 3 or more GPU setups.
- Fixed a crash that happened in graphics options when user resets cvars via console cvarResetToDefaults() command.
- Fixed a rare application crash on exit that prevented settings from being saved. It happened mostly on single-core machines, but sometimes on multi-core as well.
Enjoy!
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Saturday, January, 16, 2010 |
Gamespot's SS HD XBLA Review - Gimli - 3:49 AM - Comments - Link to this Item
Gamespot has posted their review of the XBLA version of Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter. The reviewer is satisfied with this version:
If you want to be picky about it, you can't really call this a remake. This is the first time that console gamers have gotten a look at the authentic Serious Sam: The First Encounter that was released for the PC. The version of the game released in 2002 for the original Xbox cut down the size of levels and added arcade touches, such as phone-booth save points. Now, you've finally got the real deal, a dead-on reworking of the original Serious Sam, right down to the ability to save instantly anywhere (with a quick tap of the Y button). You get the same goofy protagonist in Sam "Serious" Stone, a gravelly voiced tough guy in a T-shirt and jeans who looks and quips a whole lot like Duke Nukem. You get to gun down the same bizarre cadre of aliens under the control of a villainous ET named Mental, both solo and cooperatively. And you get to battle in and amongst a series of colossal structures in ancient Egypt, ranging from the Temple of Hatshepsut all the way to the breathtaking Great Pyramid.
Gameplay is, of course, still all about shooting and speed. You're called upon to slaughter gazillions of enemies with standard shooter hardware, such as rocket launchers, and not-so-standard shooter hardware, such as a great big cannon that might have seen duty at Gettysburg. So you constantly wheel around strafing at an amazing collection of creepy aliens, including galloping skeletons in black fetish wear, shock troops who keep their heads tucked under one arm, emerald demons juggling fireballs, robot scorpions toting machine guns, and the franchise's now iconic headless suicide bombers that come racing at you screaming with a cartoon bomb in place of each hand. Like the kids say, it's a trip. Everything feels retro given the unabashed dedication to re-creating the mood of such golden-age shooters as DOOM and Duke Nukem 3D, but this is still one of the best run-and-gun games ever made. The pace, the insane number of foes to battle, and the wide-open Egyptian levels may be simple and predictable, but it still does work. Even moving to a gamepad hasn't slowed the game down because auto-aim and more forgiving targeting compensate for the loss of accuracy in giving up the sharper mouse-and-keyboard PC controls. You can quibble over a few changes, like limiting rocket-jumping and getting rid of the zany gravity rooms that provided some memorably bloody moments way back when, but this is still a fun example of an age-old formula done to near perfection.
He ends up giving the game a 7.5.
Thanks for the heads up, Herktroz!
Another SS HD contest at Destructoid - Gimli - 3:36 AM - Comments - Link to this Item
Destructoid is giving away 10 XBLA codes for Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter. Here's what you need to do:
We're giving away ten codes for Serious Sam HD on Xbox Live Arcade! All you'll need to do to win a code is leave any kind of comment below. Doesn't matter what the comment is, just don't go spamming the comment thread!
Contest is open worldwide and open until Sunday, January 17 at 11:59 PM CST. We'll be picking ten random commenters to give the codes away to on Monday. Go go go!
Sounds easy? That's because it is! You'd be crazy to miss out on this opportunity!
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Friday, January, 15, 2010 |
SS HD XBLA Reviews! - Gimli - 4:27 AM - Comments - Link to this Item
The first batch of reviews for Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter for XBLA have arrived. To start off Games Radar posted their review. By and large it's positive, with a few complaints, resulting in a solid 8/10. Here's what the reviewer had to say:
Maybe you missed Serious Sam back in 2001? It’s a fun, frantic fantasy FPS. A headlong charge in through one end of Thebes and blasting out the other. Into space. The remake loses none of the lunacy. HD is still all about gunning down swarming enemies. Harpies that shoot ice, zombies that spray fireballs, swarms of exploding frogs, electric piranhas, bio-mechs that stomp around and shoot rockets and lasers. The Headless Kamikaze, a roaring, sprinting corpse with two ticking bombs and a personal space problem, appears in every ensemble of enemies throughout the game.
Whether it’s a dozen of them in a volatile mob, or a lone agent squawking over the din of battle, you’re always listening out for this iconic foe. Serious Sam veterans will be relieved to learn that Croteam haven’t ruined anything: the original levels are optimised and extended. They’ve made everything shiny, sprinkled on some physics, and introduced lengthy stealth sections where you must rely on colourful spirit animals to... Only joking. It’s just shinier, with the same action.
Character progression? Pah. The closest it gets to that is the guns: Sam starts with a pistol, gets his hands on a minigun, and ends up wielding a cannon. From a pirate ship. By the end, you’re committing Sirian Werebull genocide with it – it’s the only thing that can kill these enormous beasts faster than they appear, as it violently bisects the stampede in a torrent of meat. PETA just wouldn’t understand. Not after they heard the screaming.
Next up is TeamXbox. This review is a bit shorter and gives the game a 7.8, saying:
I played the game back in the day, and was frequently reminded of so many of the things I liked so much about the experience. Those damn suicide bombers, with the old-fashioned round bombs on their hands are still a treat as they run at you from across the map screaming, “Aaaaaaaa!”. And many of the other monster designs are sort of sweetly silly, like something sketched in a heavy metal fan’s high school binder. Re-inventing this game for the current market would have been a huge mistake.
Some people won’t get what’s so fun about Serious Sam, preferring the more advanced graphics and realistic action of more modern shooters. But you don’t have to be an old fart to enjoy this classic gaming throwback. Sometimes just shooting stuff without having to solve puzzles or tactically engage an enemy is what we want to do, and for that we will always have Serious Sam
Finally, there's the Videogamer review, with a score of 7. A bit from the review follows:
On the Xbox 360 the game makes good use of aiming assistance, which is essential unless you're a demon with the analogue sticks. Due to the high number of fast moving enemies coming at you, with the assist disabled the game descends into chaos. No doubt some gamers will prefer no help at all, but for me the game is more enjoyable, and considerably less frustrating, when you don't have to precisely target enemies. Also included in the 360 game is a quicksave function, letting you save on the spot with a press of the Y button.
There's no competitive versus multiplayer to speak of, but Serious Sam HD does include four-player co-op play, sadly down from the 16 players that the PC game supported. It's pretty standard stuff, but the three extra players makes things even more enjoyable and there are numerous ways to tweak the experience to suit those playing - making the game even harder if you want. It's not going to take up much of the time you've dedicated to playing Left 4 Dead 2 with friends, but it's a fun romp that's worth a go.
While the game has the "HD" moniker, the visual makeover is more than a simple bump in maximum resolution. Enemy models are the most improved, sporting far more detail than they did in the original game, but the lighting, effects and environmental detail have also been overhauled. Serious Sam HD doesn't look as good as new releases, such as Modern Warfare 2, but it has a certain charm that few games can offer. Enemy designs are barmy, battles play out over huge indoor and outdoor arenas, and it all runs well on the Xbox 360 hardware. There's some suitably freaky music and sound effects to accompany the on-screen carnage, too, making you twitch in shock on more than one occasion.
Overall, all three reviews are pretty positive with a few complaints.
SS HD XBLA Giveaway at Giant Bomb! - Gimli - 3:40 AM - Comments - Link to this Item
Devolver Digital sent some XBLA download codes to Giant Bomb to give away to people. There's 10 of them, and here's how you can get them:
This week marks the arrival of Serious Sam HD: The First Enounter on Xbox Live Arcade in all its screamy, no-headed glory. To celebrate, our goodly friends at Devolver Digital have furnished us with 10 XBLA download codes for the game to give away to you, dear readers. Which means that it's time for a truly ridiculous and arbitrary contest!
If there's one thing I've learned from the Giant Bomb forums, it's that there's no shortage of deeply disturbed individuals with access to Photoshop around here, which leads us to our Serious Sam HD giveaway challenge: We want to see your most serious Sam. Whether that means Samuel L. Jackson doing his taxes or Uncle Sam hosting a satellite radio show is wide open to interpretation, and we invite you to get creative and absurd with your photo editing skillz.
Post your submission in the comments below by end-of-day Sunday (01/17/2010), and we'll announce the winners on Monday (01/18/2010 for you math majors out there.) If you're looking for some inspirado, here's a refresher course in what makes Serious Sam so stupid awesome.
Hurry up, you've only got two days left!
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Wednesday, January, 13, 2010 |
SS HD Available Now on XBLA! - Gimli - 10:25 AM - Comments - Link to this Item
Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter has been released by Majesco on XBLA today. Here's what Majesco has to say in the press release:
"This game takes my good looks, swarthy charm and timeless cool from the original version and ups it to a level of god-like brilliance," says Sam ‘Serious' Stone, everyone's favorite loud mouth protagonist. "Gamers can even play online with up to three friends to wipe out the thorn in my side known as the Sirian Army."
Developed by Croteam, the creators of the Serious Sam franchise, and produced in partnership with Devolver Digital, Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter follows our hero Sam as he frantically battles his way through time to ancient Egypt. Throughout 15 levels of awesomeness, he takes on a seemingly never-ending onslaught of enemies, from the charging Sirian Werebulls to the screaming Headless Kamikazes. Whether blowing apart nasties with monstrous cannons or ripping them to shreds with the lead-spewing minigun, the tools and the talent are at your disposal to ensure non-stop butt-kicking action over Xbox LIVE Arcade for Xbox 360.
You can get the game from the Xbox live marketplace for 1200 MS points. Tell your friends! Tell your enemies! Tell everyone!
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Friday, January, 08, 2010 |
Edge article on Serious Sam - Gimli - 4:30 AM - Comments - Link to this Item
Edge has posted an article about Serious Sam with a nice look at the design of the series. It's a good read despite one or two factual errors:
The fact that the game thrums with such ill-behaved humour isn’t much of a secret, however, apparent from the moment the player boots up. From the jester-like jingle accompanying Croteam’s logo, to the bouncy stock-cartoon noises and party-invite font of the front-end – and Sam watching on, impatiently tapping at the TV screen – there can be no doubt that the circus is in town. Even Sam’s outfit is far from regulation for an action hero. His chest bears his game’s emoticon-simple logo, a grinning bomb with a fizzing fuse, as efficiently iconic and instructive as they get. His voice is gravelled to the point of sounding borderline demonic, his jaw could be used to lay tarmac, and his outlook continues the work started by Duke Nukem. Sam is one of videogames’ few homegrown comic-book heroes, completely in and of himself, despite inhabiting a genre that thrives on inbreeding. There’s no cinematic pretence, no emotional manipulation, no kowtowing, no apparent intelligence or progressive design; just a game with enormous balls and an indie sensibility backed up with some professional focus.
In principle, it’s understandably easy to embrace such brazen, if charismatic, simplicity. But in practice, how can Sam hold his own in a genre that’s obsessed with pushing bleeding-edge looks, and with dizzying the player through refinements and elaborations of rule-sets and load-outs? It’s a question to which the answer is, appropriately, very simple. Sam is a truly serious game, one whose appreciation of the basics of the form approaches the puritanical. It’s a game that sneers at innovation, calls it a pussy and lights a match off its face – an exuberant but infinitely unpretentious shooter that revels in systematic annihilation, which is what the genre is all about. So much so, in fact, that it’s hard not to think of it as some kind of estranged 3D great-grandson of Space Invaders – shoot, dodge, shoot, dodge. In those days that kind of gameplay would be called intuitive. Now, Sam notwithstanding, FPSes have become the poster boys for the high barrier to entry modern gaming has developed.
Read the rest here.
SS HD Weekend Deal on Steam - Gimli - 3:58 AM - Comments - Link to this Item
Steam has a weekend deal of only $6.79 for Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter. What are you waiting for? Buy it now, and buy it for your friends as well!
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Tuesday, January, 05, 2010 |
SS HD gets another patch! - Gimli - 2:25 PM - Comments - Link to this Item
Croteam has just released another patch for Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter. Here's the changelog:
Voting can change difficulty.
Vote Time Ban Player.
When a player leaves the game, its vote is reset and vote status is updated accordingly.
Fixed multimonitor spanning resolutions and other non-standard resolutions were not appearing in the graphics options menu.
Locale override can now be specified on the command line with "+locale " (without quotes), where is one of: enu, fra, itl, deu, esp.
Non-signed .gro files are allowed for all localized files.
Controller binding customization now supports Jump and Crouch commands.
The last door on Karnak level (in campaign game, not demo) never opened in coop if Extra MP Enemies is OFF.
Changed the DirectX detection to launch the DirectX setup provided with the game instead of directing users to web installer, since the web installer cannot fix broken installations.
Some spawn effects were not visible on client machines.
Fixed crumbs not being recached when some of their parameters changed through cvars or menus.
Fixed problems with crumbs taking too much GPU memory.
Fixed problems with GPU memory overflowing and/or slowdowns when entering Netricsa's enemies or weapons screens.
Connecting to a server where no music is playing, would cause the client to crash at a later time.
Fixed some problems with XAudio2 mixer on high sample rates.
Fixed rare crash when menu got into a dummy state (no screen active).
Fixed problem with full-screen gamma correction settings and/or other color presets not being applied when gfx mode has been restarted, or when going from full-screen to windowed mode and back.
Invisible scrollbar arrow buttons no longer make focus-sound when mouse pointer moves across them.
Fixed issue when sometimes a client would hit a projectile with a bullet, the projectile would just disappear without an explosion effect.
If you're wondering what delayed the patch, Croteam's Alen Ladavac has a response:
Anyway, we are not thriving to provide more details because they are rather boring, but if you insist.... we planned to have another quick fix patch soon after the first one and to also piggyback demo recording feature onto it, then to ship dedicated servers a week after that, then to add deathmatch a few weeks later. That was a theory. As they say: In theory, practice does not deviate from theory, but in practice it does. What happened in practice was this:
Demo recording is based on recording network messages, and it has exposed some subtle glitches in networking that are invisible when playing online but that make demos look completely broken in some situations. After delaying for more than a week trying to fix that, we decided to drop demo recording for now and just ship the fixes first. But then we hit another problem. Due to some problems with development servers for Steam we were unable to upload new updates to Steam at all. I've talked about that problem before. It took a a lot of time both on our side and Valve's to find a workaround. It was finally possible for us to upload two days before the holidays. We already had a patch ready with the fixes. But the divine forces obviously didn't want us to release it just yet... As dedicated servers were also worked on in parallel in the mean time, a change in network connection code has caused a crash in normal, non-dedicated servers. We've only found that a few hours before the holidays and had to cancel that release in the last minute.
Now, we have a patch with fixes ready, and it should _hopefully_ (I'm starting to hate that word), finally be available tonight (CET). Demo recording will then be released next. We need to get back to it and see if there are some more things to fix there.
Dedicated servers have been worked on in parallel and are basically functional. They took much more time than initially estimated, because of some differences in the Steam API when using the server enumeration, instead of P2P playing as is used currently. There are still some kinks to iron out, e.g. invitations don't work with ded servers yet, and similar.
Deathmatch is worked on in parallel as well. And some of it already works as well, but is not yet in a releasable state, as it's been dragged back by problems described above.
Ok? Happy now?
Well, there you have it.
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Sunday, January, 03, 2010 |
Croteam says SS isn't simplistic - Gimli - 2:59 PM - Comments - Link to this Item
Another article comes from Destructoid today. This one talks about the complexity of Serious Sam gameplay:
"[However] people seem not to realize how complex Serious Sam gameplay actually is. Most of the time you can hear them saying you just run and shoot or it's a brainless shooter. However, I would like to see them play on some higher difficulty than Tourist or Easy. Not to mention on Serious difficulty. I bet they would survive only for a few seconds there in some mid-sized fights with just 3-4 enemies on scene. If of course they use cheats, which they mostly do and then comment on easy, boring or not challenging and complex enough.
"Serious Sam is a game that requires precise movements, choosing the right weapon at the right time, knowing how many rockets or bullets can kill each specific enemy or wound him or interrupt his attack, so you can switch to other weapons and dispose of another bunch of enemies charging from behind and get back to the original enemy. Enemies do appear dumb, but in large numbers they are deadly if you are not careful or don't think quickly. Our game sometimes generates hundreds of enemies charging, shooting or flying from above. To further add to that situation, you are running at ten meters per second. So, it gets very hard to stay alive. However, once you master the situation, you then think that was pretty easy. You just needed the right combination of clicks, maneuvers, shots and weapons."
So there you have it. Serious Sam is pretty bloody strategic if you think about it. Let it never be said that the game is just a dumb shooter ever again. It shall be you who appears dumb for saying such a thing.
There's another problem here - save scumming design. A lot of games these days are designed with this in mind, which destroys challenge.
Croteam CEO on SS HD - Gimli - 2:22 PM - Comments - Link to this Item
Destructoid recently asked Croteam's CEO Roman Ribaric some questions about the HD remake of Serious Sam: The First Encounter. Roman explains the conversion to HD:
"Funny how some think that HD is achieved by raising the resolution and that's it," states Ribaric. "Well, that's not what HD actually means in the games development. At least not when it comes to Serious Sam HD. It's changing key aspects to a higher quality level, adding some new things like leaderboards and achievements and making it possible (financially and technically) to have the continuous future improvements.
"A lot of work had to be done to achieve HD mark. We first had to code the converters to import the old levels, so the gameplay could stay intact. Then we redid most of the levels geometry to get more details and also increased the quality or created the new level textures. Further, we recreated enemies in high poly, since we only have them previously modeled in low poly. Same was for enemy skins, first newly created in Zbrush and then finalized in Photoshop. Same procedure was also done for weapons. Key with all that work was not to loose that original feel."
Ribaric also tells us about the new Serious Engine used in Serious Sam HD and reveals that Serious Sam 3 shall show off its true power: As for Serious Engine 3, it's built from the Serious Sam 2 engine, but it was also heavily recoded. Multiplayer code was also heavily recoded. And a lot of work was invested to get that true HDR lighting, which calculates in a matter of minutes and not days or long hours as with other such engines. Although, you can't see all the bells and whistles of new tech just yet. All that will be shown in full color in Serious Sam 3."
So there. Not easy work.
Can't wait to see Serious Engine 3 in its full glory!
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Thursday, December, 31, 2009 |
Prophets of Sam Rings in the New Year! - Louva-Deus - 11:32 PM - Comments - Link to this Item
Prophets
of Sam sent a message wishing a happy holidays to Serious Sam fans
everywhere and Seriously! would like to add our own holiday greetings.
Have a happy New Year everyone! Don't do anything we wouldn't do...
Prophets of Sam also wanted us to mention that they will be releasing
the official Serious Sam Forever Multiplayer Demo within the
next week or two. A great start to a new year!
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Thursday, December, 24, 2009 |
Serious Sam HD - 25% Off - Rodzilla - 12:25 AM - Comments - Link to this Item
Steam is currently offering significant discounts on games for the holidays. Among these specials is a deal on Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter for a mere $14.99 through January 3rd. So head on over to the Steam store to grab the game if you haven't already, and be sure to check out the rest of their deals!
Update: And only today you can grab the game at 50% off! What are you waiting for, a one-liner?
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