Slycne said:
Char-Nobyl said:
Interesting observation that it's the holographic-sighted assault rifle that's the least satisfying weapon to use, though the only real downside that I can see is that it looks like most of the weapons are...well, normal. The rocket launcher looks fancy enough, and the minigun is a staple of any crowd-control shooter, but as someone who had played 'Painkiller' before even knowing ZP existed (I hate myself for how hipster that sounds), I know that you can make a diverse set of weapons that are satisfying to use.
Certainly they are not as fanciful as Painkillers X combined with Y arsenal, but even the simply fare of shotgun and sledgehammer just feel a lot more fun to kill with than the assault rifle. The actual gigantic cannonball firing cannon and the minion piercing grenade sniper devastator are by no means mundane however.
Oh, I didn't want to imply that they were less satisfying than the assault rifle. Even if I only had the video as a reference point, that would look to be the case.
What I wanted to put across was that simply being
more satisfying than the bland assault rifle seems...minimalist. I mean, I've got a sledge hammer in my garage, and I've used it enough to know that it doesn't make things explode into messy chunks. Same thing goes for a shotgun: these are tools/weapons that I've actually used.
Maybe that's the root of it. I've got absolutely no problem with reducing enemies to gibs with the swing of a superpowered melee weapon, or turning them into a red mist from a distance, but I think the problem arises when it's done with stuff that I know for a fact can't do that. And as stupid as this is going to sound, when one of the charging monsters explodes into blood and entrails from a shotgun blast at least a good ten meters away, everything just seems fake. Or like I'm playing with the difficulty turned way down, or with an insta-kill cheat on. I mean, it's a world where aliens exist. Give me something equally-fantastic to kill them with, and I won't have any trouble accepting the goresplosions. But an alarming amount of the time, the clips look like it's some sort of Call of Duty/Battlefield mod that's reskinning all the weapons into bland, SI gear.
That's at least in-part why this post worried me:
keiskay said:
you should only compare it the first two sam games. TFE and TSE, both games had for the most part normal looking weapons. they were just more classical looking. many of us sam fans dont consider SS2 to be a real sam game since it was so different and not the same.
This has the same effect on me as being served a perfectly-cooked steak, finishing it, and then receiving an apology from the chef because he usually burns it more.
I couldn't remember the previous two games (First and Second Encounter) very well, so I looked them up, and Jesus Christ, really? If Asylum Films [http://www.theasylum.cc/] had a video game division, the cover art of 'Serious Sam: the First Encounter' would be what they made to try and mooch off the success of Duke Nukem.
I mean, look at him [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/88/Ssfebox.jpg]! A man with bulging muscles and a flat-top haircut, wearing a tank top, jeans, and a pair of sunglasses? Fighting aliens with guns blazing, spent casings spilling out of them? That's a word-for-word description of the cover of Duke Nukem 3D [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/61/Duke_Nukem_3D_Coverart.png].
Look, I won't call Serious Sam a ripoff of Duke Nukem, because it's not. But look what I'm left with here: the game that I at least
remember enjoying is apparently disowned by the fanbase, in a franchise called 'Serious Sam' starring a character named
"Serious" Sam Stone in his (more or less) one-man battle against an alien menace...and one installment was disowned by fans
for not being serious enough.
Ugh. I'm probably putting too much thought into this.
