Review – Serious Sam Double D ⁰

by Adam Blue • Reviews

Serious Sam is an FPS franchise that has been quite fun over the years. It takes an old-school approach and makes it as wacky as possible. Enemies just teleport in to slay, but Sam usually packs a large arsenal of rocket launchers and mini-guns to lay waste. Serious Sam: Double D is the first of three indie Serious Same games to be released around the launch of the third Serious Sam FPS.

Double D is a side-scroller shoot-em-up, using the right analog stick (or mouse) as the aiming mechanism. It’s pretty much how you would play an FPS as a side-scroller. You collect weapons which allow you to stack them on top of each other for simultaneous firepower. I hope that made sense – you literally stack a weapon on another. This game lets you do that. The game encompasses a series of stages in various locales which include boss fights and old school-style secret areas.

Enough of the basic description – this game is wacky. Not only is there forgettable but smirkable dialog full of innuendos between Sam and a Cortana like ‘helper’, but you will fight dinosaurs outfitted with robotics who in turn fight other dinosaurs. Chimputees, chimpanzees amputated and outfitted with guns, shooting exploding bananas, a giant pink mech with a purse that shoots kisses at you, and lava monsters on pogo sticks. This game really has everything. I was able to use the 360 gamepad flawlessly, and the controls were tight, which was necessary for secrets that require Sam’s jump-pad to scale walls.

And that everything equals fun. It’s your standard side-scrolling shoot-em-up, but enough strategy is required as to not die. Running in guns blazing will not work, though you are doing that most of the time. But that’s all there is to it, and it’s enough. Any old-school gamer will appreciate this, and I’m sure the newer generation would also have fun.

The visuals consist of hand-drawn graphics which do look cheap, but work well for the game. I’m not sure if these style of graphics would ever be accepted for a mainstream, full-priced game. There’s something about the style that looks cheap. But if it means banging out a fun game quickly, I’m all for it.

Serious Sam: Double D is totally worth the purchase. I grabbed it on Steam for under $10. It’s supposed to be released on XBLA at a later date, and I would be willing to buy it again and play through for achievements. Yes, that’s sad.

Duke Nukem Forever Review ⁷

by Adam Blue • Reviews

Probably the most controversial game release since….ever, I beat Duke Nukem Forever this weekend and have a lot to say about how it has been received. Will this be a review of the game, or a review of the media in the gaming industry? Let’s start with what I think about this game.

Fucking awesome. Yeah, that’s more than I thought when I first played it. It just got better as time went. But what made it so good? A number of things that current gamers are blind of. While the game is an FPS, it’s correct to say that it’s a Duke Nukem Adventure game. You’re not necessarily shooting bad guys all the time. A lot of the time your solving puzzles, exploring the world, and interacting with said world – all in the name of Duke. By being Duke, the exploration and interaction has a larger layer of interactivity to it.

The install of the game was flawless; the game booted up immediately and I didn’t have to sit through any opening advertising crap. Anytime I would exit and return, the game loaded up in a matter of seconds. That could be because of my beastly machine, or because the game was simply designed well.

Back when Duke Nukem 3D first came out FPSs were still an amazement. It wasn’t a game you bought to just sit back and shoot. It was played for the experience of gaming brought into a realistic first-person experience. After time, and after years of refining game engines, countless developers would release FPSs with the budget and time spent on amazing graphics. Going back to Duke Nukem Forever, we have a game that was made as a sequel to a mid-nineties FPS. Quality gameplay that has been missing for sometime.

As for the shooting aspect, the guns and explosives are pretty much all from Duke3D. None are redundant either. They have a purpose and it was surprising to see reviewers, such as Ars, say that they are pointless. In DNF, you can only carry two weapons at once which has been a staple of FPSs since Halo. At first, I didn’t like it, but after some time it just felt right. I had what I needed when I needed it. Most all types of weapons were laying around somewhere, and ammo was abundant when necessary. But again, this isn’t shooter-focused like Call of Duty and Halo is.

Another change was made to the health system. Instead of health packs, you have, again, like Halo, a recharging health system. Here, it’s called ‘Ego’ and fits in with the ‘Duke Nukem Adventure’ quite well. You can actually upgrade your ‘Ego’ by interacting with the environment. You will come across multiple paths, which could just carry you on to the next level, or bring you to an area filled with interactivity. This presents replayability. I am missing some easter eggs and achievements, so I know there’s a lot more to the world than I even discovered myself. Some of it may seem lame, since nowadays the internet pretty much tells you everything you can do, so there’s less for someone to try and figure out on their own. Shame.

The graphics are completely fine. They are smooth, rarely ever buggy, emitting a purpose and mood due to effects like lighting, particles, and other modern enhancements. The over-use of shininess is absent. It’s realistic in design. Things are designed and look as they would in front of you. Simply, there is nothing wrong here and it looks great. But if you’re playing it on a console…I don’t know what to tell you.

As part of the ‘Duke Nukem Experience’, you get to witness a lot of the game’s humor. It’s the type of humor that is pretty regular around my friends. Though, most of these pussy editors, especially from Ars, try to act like they’re on some kind of fucking high-horse, reprimanding the game for what other games don’t do enough. This totally invalidates any gaming cred, as it goes against the idea that games can be looked at as movies and music, where emotion varies on what is being provoked. Yes it is opinion, but it’s shitty opinion and rather embarrassing.

The Ars Technica review for the game is rather…well, it’s made as entertainment really, and if you wanted actual impressions of the game, don’t go by their review. Read it for some satire of the joke that Duke Nukem Forever created:

The joke in the image below may have been about Doom and shooters in 2010, but it still fits when talking about Duke Nukem Forever.

This is just blantantly incorrect. There are many levels in the game that have quite a circumference, and require traveling back-and-forth. And for that to be a complaint, it further adds to my next point:

These reviews are made for hits. It’s how the gaming media works. Duke Nukem has been a joke, and this is a wet dream of editors to do a review of. Gamers on the internet like to be angry, and the bandwagon for Duke hate was already big enough. To get hits, the media needs to cater to this bandwagon. That’s exactly what they did. I would challenge them to defy the norms, but I’m sure the top-boss prefers a more controversial style of writing.

So, we have gamers on a bandwagon, which I’m familiar with living in Texas – when the Mavericks started doing good, people that didn’t watch sports before were on board, as well as the Rangers, Cowboys…you know how it is. And this is human nature. Majority of humans = can’t think for themselves, so the chance of a majority of gamers being stupid equals probably just as much of the majority. Totally unwilling to challenge themselves or what they’ve been told to like/dislike. …man, can that get into some deep, unrelated-to-gaming shit.

To further drive in the point of these reviews being absolute jokes, the primary platform reviewed was the 360. Console ports are pretty horrible anyway, and DNF has always been a PC title first. It wasn’t until Gearbox got involved that it was ported…this was to maximize profits. I see no wrong in that. Gearbox brought us DNF anyway.

Read this review of the reviews. It’s spot-on: Link.

This is what reviewers pray for nightly. A game that is so awfully, joyously unreviewable that every drop of snark they can muster can just masterfully splatter all over the virtual page. Reviewers are grateful for things like this. Such as this review of the movie aimed at the identical target market for DNF, Sucker Punch.

Penny Arcade has some nice things to say about the PR aftermath. Spot-on:

There is nothing – let me repeat – there is nothing strange about what he said. It is only strange that he said it. What he described is the way it already works, which is why it didn’t seem weird to him as he was typing it. The relationship between publishers and the press is increasingly fraught, and with good reason; outside of a handful of truly massive outlets, the press literally has nothing to offer them.

In the end, we truly have a game here. No filler, no wasting time, varied levels and events. It’s truly not a CoD. If you wanted CoD, reasses your gaming nature and why you are reading this blog. It is definitely worth a purchase, especially on PC.

So, was this review even any good? Does complaining even matter? These media outlets make money on hits. Whether they are correct or not is irrelevant, but I’d hate for this game to go unnoticed. Though, that is not the case here, and its sales numbers should show that. I’m just hoping for another sequel!