Serious Sam HD:The First Encounter Xbox

Serious Sam caused something of a murmur when it burst upon the FPS scene back in the early 2000's. Even back then, the FPS genre had backed away, bit by bit, from the balls-to-the-wall insanity of early genre heavyweights like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D and was easing its way into the sophisticated world of Half-Life and System Shock 2. Serious Sam, with its brightly colored, mow-'em-down ethos unexpectedly evoked the zeitgeist of an era long past, and tapped into an undercurrent of adrenaline-fueled gameplay that had been lying dormant in gamers' twitchy index fingers.
So developer Croteam must hope it will go, again, with the series' latest release: Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter. This budget-priced update of the original Serious Sam title features revamped graphics, a new co-op online mode, and a whole lot of old-school ass-kickin' for the greater glory of mankind. And while the new visuals go a long way in toward moving the series into today's world of bells and whistles, at its core, Sam HD is very much from the "old school."