Serious Sam: The Second Encounter
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter is a 2002 first-person shooter game developed by Croteam and published by Gathering of Developers. It is the successor to Serious Sam: The First Encounter and the second game in the Serious Sam series. Taking place immediately after The First Encounter, it follows the soldier Sam "Serious" Stone, whose spaceship crashes back to Earth on his way from ancient Egypt to Sirius, requiring him to seek the Holy Grail to continue his journey. As Sam, the player traverses linear levels, either enclosed or set on open plains, and battles increasingly large waves of enemies with an expanding arsenal. The gameplay builds on that of The First Encounter while adding additional weapons, more enemy types, and platforming elements, and additionally contains the Seriously Warped Deathmatch mod by A Few Screws Loose.
The development began immediately after Croteam had completed the first game. Working in an improved version of Serious Engine with an expanded team, the studio set out to move away from the ancient Egyptian setting and incorporated larger levels and additional weapons. Initially intended as a mission pack, The Second Encounter was turned into a standalone product for its February 2002 release. The game received positive reviews, with praise for its improvements over The First Encounter but criticism for its lack of innovation. The level variety and presentation were well received, as were the music and inclusion of power-ups. The bosses raised mixed opinions. Like its predecessor, the game was highlighted for its price–performance ratio. It was GameSpots "Game of the Month" for February 2002 and "Best Budget Game on PC" of the year.
The Second Encounter and its predecessor have been combined into one in several packages, including an Xbox port released by Gotham Games in November 2002. Instead of a third episode, The Second Encounter was followed up by a sequel, Serious Sam 2, in October 2005. With the publisher Devolver Digital, Croteam developed a remake, Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter, that was first released in April 2010 and later brought to Xbox 360, Stadia, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. A virtual reality version of that remake, Serious Sam VR: The Second Encounter, was released in April 2017.
Gameplay
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter is a first-person shooter that expands upon the gameplay of its predecessor, Serious Sam: The First Encounter. As Sam "Serious" Stone, the player traverses twelve mostly linear levels across three thematic settings. In each level, the player faces large waves of enemies. Some spaces are arenas that need to be cleared of enemies before the player can proceed. The Second Encounter adds seven enemy variants to the cast of the original game, which similarly exhibit the behaviour of approaching or shooting at the player directly. Unlike The First Encounter, the game features several stages with dynamic environments, such as rooms with multi-directional gravity, multiple arena floors, or slippery ice sections. The Second Encounter also introduces platforming elements, and makes traps appear more frequently. The end of each thematic setting features a boss battle.The Second Encounter expands Sam's arsenal from The First Encounter to include a chainsaw, a flamethrower, and a sniper rifle with a scope. The scarcely available Serious Bomb kills all enemies within the blast range. The game further adds four power-ups with temporary effects: Serious Speed, Serious Damage, Invulnerability, and Invisibility. In multiplayer, The Second Encounter supports cooperative play on all single-player maps for up to sixteen players. For the deathmatch modes, the game increased the number of levels to eight. The game includes the Seriously Warped Deathmatch mod, which comprises twenty deathmatch levels, additional weapons, and modes like capture the flag.
Plot
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter begins with recounting the events of The First Encounter: In the 22nd century, alien forces commanded by Mental were attacking humanity, whose leaders sent the soldier Sam "Serious" Stone back in time to ancient Egypt using an artefact called the Time-Lock. Sam's mission was to uncover information about the builders of the Time-Lock, the ancient alien civilisation of the Sirians. He fought his way through Egypt and discovered a Sirian spaceship, the SSS Centerprice. At the Great Pyramid, he defeated Ugh-Zan III, entered the spaceship, and took off towards Sirius.Following the first game's events, a group of onlookers attempts to catch up to the Centerprice and inadvertently collides with it, causing the ship to fall back to Earth and crash into the Sierra Madre de Chiapas, near the Maya city of Palenque. Using information obtained from the Centerprice, Sam's Neurotronically Implanted Combat Situation Analyzer informs him that the Sirians had prepared a backup vehicle in case the spaceship was destroyed. Sam must therefore find the Holy Grail, which is located 400 years away. As the Sirians had built a Time-Lock for each ancient civilisation, NETRICSA guides him to that of the Mayans in Teotihuacan. After passing through the legendary Xibalba underneath the city, he arrives at the Pyramid of the Sun and defeats the wind god Kukulkan, who was guarding the Time-Lock.
This transports Sam to a ziggurat in Babylonia. He heads into Persepolis to find the temple of Gilgamesh, the palace of King Tilmun, and ultimately the Tower of Babel. Collecting the three Tablets of Wisdom in the surrounding gardens grants him entry to the tower, where he kills the Exotech Larva, Mental's purpose-designed guard for the Babylonian Time-Lock.
Sam arrives in the medieval Polish town of Krwawitze in 1138. NETRICSA informs him of the powerful Arc-Al-Magi guild of wizards and guides him to their Book of Wisdom, which reveals the location of the Holy Grail. The book leads Sam to the former Arc-Al-Magi hideout, where a magic portal in the fabled Lava Caves takes him to the Ice Castle with the Holy Grail. Inside, however, he finds the grail to have been removed. NETRICSA believes the Arc-Al-Magi were attacked by Mental's forces and hid the Holy Grail at their Church of Sacred Blood. Sam passes through the Corridor of Death to reach the cathedral, where he overcomes Mordekai the Summoner, one of Mental's longest servants, to obtain the Holy Grail. Finally, he uses the backup rocket ship to continue his journey to Sirius.
Development and release
The Croatian studio Croteam began working on Serious Sam: The Second Encounter immediately after completing The First Encounter. The original game was successful enough for the company to purchase new computer hardware to use for further development. Early on, Croteam hired the level designer Ivan Mika and the programmer Nikola Mosettig, bringing its headcount to twelve. Later recruitments included the programmer Darko Martinović and the business assistant Helena Hunski, and more were brought in as Croteam moved into larger offices during development. The Second Encounter was initially handled as a mission pack until Croteam's chief executive officer, Roman Ribarić, and Gathering of Developers agreed to make it a standalone product. Although marketed as a sequel, Ribarić stated The Second Encounter was "neither a mission pack nor a sequel; it is simply the next episode".The team built the game on an upgraded version of Serious Engine, which it had developed for The First Encounter. Improvements to the engine's tools were developed with suggestions from their fan community, which provided daily feedback through emails and forums. New features included skeletal animation, Ogg Vorbis audio compression, enhanced destruction effects, a procedural particle system, and support for DirectX. While Mosettig was working on the particle system, he accidentally duplicated one line of code that caused everything to be rendered twice. When he noticed this and removed the line, the game's performance improved significantly and the frame rate doubled.
The Second Encounter moved away from the ancient Egyptian setting of The First Encounter. Ribarić believed creating three new environments would help maintain the interest of those who played the first game. Within the new settings, Mika designed his first level around Teotihuacan. The resulting level had to be split into three, accounting for a quarter of the entire game. Although the game has fewer levels than The First Encounter, Croteam aimed to make individual levels larger and added more interactive elements to add variety to the gameplay. As the original arsenal "had enough weapons", the few new ones were added solely for their profound impact on the gameplay. Some planned weapons, including a mortar strapped to Sam's back, were scrapped. By mid-September 2001, the game was "almost complete" in an alpha state, with Croteam targeting a release in December 2001. At Ribarić's request, the four-person mod team A Few Screws Loose worked with Croteam to produce an updated version of their Seriously Warped Deathmatch mod to be packaged with the game.
Gathering of Developers formally announced The Second Encounter in September 2001 and scheduled it for release in November. The game entered alpha testing in early October and was content-complete in beta three weeks later. While a second stage of beta testing took place at TalonSoft at the end of the month, Croteam had begun working on the game's voice acting and manual. In early November, The Second Encounter was delayed to early 2002 while Croteam sought to resolve bugs. By 10 December, it was a "gold candidate" awaiting approval for release from Take-Two. Croteam had completed a demo for the game by this time, releasing it the following day. It was also hosted on several mirror sites. When reviewing the tentative box art from Gathering of Developers, Croteam requested several changes, most of which were not implemented due to time constraints. Take-Two announced that The Second Encounter had gone gold on 4 January 2002. Gathering of Developers released it on 5 February 2002. Some retailers in the United Kingdom had broken the street date two weeks early. To promote the game, it was exhibited at thirty iGaming LAN gaming centres during the week after the release, with some of them providing a preview on 3 February. The publisher also launched the "Disco Inferno" contest that gave away a GeForce 4 Ti 4600 graphics card to the designer of the best "disco cathedral" deathmatch map.