SS2 also allows you to switch between the two shotguns repeatedly for rapid fire shotgunning.
Not to mention the troll snowman.
I love all main SS games equally (each suck and excell in different areas, IMHO), but it was very refreshing to see somebody not completely sucking the game's dick. I mean, HL2 is my favorite game of all time and I can go on for hours about how shit it is, if it makes sense. Anyway, probably one of his best videos.
or the pill in the mayan level that spawns a fuckhuge zoidberg kamikaze that instagibs you more often than not
I must admit I certainly have not stumbled upon all of that stuff comprehensively and I am unaware of lots of secrets, even though I somehow managed to accidentally stumble upon the midnight ultra secret except I just saw the notification that it activated without knowing where it was.
some are out of the way, others are pretty obvious
Speaking of the mayan level (third level overall iirc?) there's also a pyramid you can completely level, with the help of a switch - which IIRC reveals a orange Highlander
Slightly unrelated but I noticed from youtube videos that in the first encounter there are fundamentally more enemies and more difficult enemies on serious difficulty, however I am not sure if that is the case in the second encounter.
The final tower defense battle before the final boss was a serious sam fight to end all serious sam fights, as a result it is kind of difficult to imagine it being even more hectic so I am not sure.
Lack of multigravity ruined plenty of puzzles in the HD remake IMO
Could you please elaborate what made directional gravity so special in the first two games in relation to the later ones?
So the second encounter part with the omnidirecitonal cylinder room would not happen in the later games?
Yep, that's one of the puzzles that got borked
Sounds like a gargantuan pain in the ass! Kind of strange how the updated engine seems to be less sophisticated than the older one in this respect.
Usually with game engines, as you add more complex features (more in depth particle systems, more accurate skeletal rigs and physical simulation systems, etc.) you tend to lose the ability to do the really weird shit older games did easily. A lot of older game physics systems were quite rigid in how they worked and developers could fake a lot of things as a result (the directional gravity of SE1 was probably nothing more than a clever bit of physics engine manipulation to make actions relative to the player not the world). But with the more dynamic physics engines and more accurate physics engines that players have come to expect from new games it gets a bit harder to fake this kind of stuff without side effects.
It probably wouldn't be an impossible thing to add back in for their modern SE iterations. But there's probably a large number of edge cases now thanks to unrelated systems interacting with the physics engine.
That makes sense, so it's like a physics version of graphics where the more complex ingame graphics are the more difficult it tends to be to design them. Or with processors how in commodore 64 it was possible to write shit directly in assembler but modern processors are way too complicated so no one does that anymore.
It is a curious paradox of greater power at the trade of it being progressively more difficult to master and make it do ultra specific quirky shit.
I would like to join the Serious Sam 2 praise here. The game was heavily criticized by fans of the first two games, but it is a fun game. The begining is pretty bad, but I think after the battle with those large robot spiders the game just gets better and better. It is the most varied game in the series, with a ton of enemy types and levels.
IMO The Second Encounter is the best game in the series and should have been the model for future Serious Sam games. It improved on everything from TFE with better level variety, great battle design, more weapons and more enemy types. SS3 was very disappointing to me, it was yet another remake of TFE, but with all the color washed out. All new enemies sucked, like the Witch Bride, hitscan soldier, helicopter and those pillar jumping monkeys. SS3 also lacked verticality, the flying enemies were rarely used and there were no swimming sections, jumping, gravity rooms, etc...
So, what I would like is for Croteam to make The Third Encounter, a true sequel to TSE, with colorful ancient locations and carefully handcrafted enemy encounter and arenas and classic gameplay. This new SS4 which is set in modern-ish Earth is yet another prequel and it doesn't sound good to me. They promise it would be more open, with more enemies on screen at once, but I am afraid it will just be a mess, and wouldn't be surprised they use some kind of proceduraly generated enemy battles, instead of carefully designing the battles themselves. And if the last two games, Bogus Detour and that VR game are any indication, I can already see the game having some point collecting and skill and weapon upgrade system, which I am not a fan of.
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