![]() I’m not “offended,” but I grew up in a small, regional town in Australia where the primary industries are farming and tourism created by backpackers coming to work on the farms. I may be reading too much into it, but I see in this series of events the pervasive idea that people in remote, rural, regional, and metropolitan areas exist on a sliding scale of inherent value or intelligence. ![]() Then, when Crypto-137 reaches the suburbs, there’s a different vibe to the population, and Crypto has to manipulate the media rather than the mayor. There’s a whole bunch of farmers and small-town folk who are portrayed as total morons. It is a remaster advertised as a remake, and that dated humor totally misses the mark in 2020. In contrast, Destroy All Humans! is the product of a bygone era. For example, the female members of Sam’s team are not overtly sexualized, and the goofy characters, though often stereotypical, are not offensively so. As cataclysmically dumb as Serious Sam 4 is, it’s also a little bit responsible. The reason for the different results isn’t context but content. I didn’t finish Destroy All Humans! earlier this year. However, there is a difference between those two stupid games. I’d watched videos and read reviews and knew that Serious Sam 4 was, with the possible exception of Destroy All Humans!, the stupidest game of 2020. Serious Sam 4 is a perfect circuit breaker.Īnd I’d known what I was getting into when I started the game. And they do it without the jarring tonal inconsistencies that sometimes crop up when this kind of unfiltered nonsense finds its way into more earnest games. Isn’t that why we watch rom-coms and Netflix chaff? Even though these types of games are retrograde, they play a worthwhile role in balancing out the more moderate humor and attitude that proliferates in gaming. It’s militaristic, overly macho garbage with almost no intrinsic value.īut sometimes, that white noise is exactly what we need. Serious Sam 4 is eight or nine hours of white noise. And there’s no real sense of reward, no satisfaction for bringing down a particularly tough enemy or overcoming a psychological challenge. The dialogue is 50% crappy one-liners, and the gameplay is 80% “hold down the trigger and strafe until everything stops moving.” are trying to find the Holy Grail because it’s secretly a weapon that will push back the alien hordes. I mean, the storyline is that Sam and co. The game has moments of self-awareness and threats of meta-commentary, but they are fleeting in this schlockiest of D-grade-Steven-Seagal-action-movie wannabes. Serious Sam 4 is a brash “heck off” to that kind of high-mindedness. That desire is how the medium moves forward in its capacity for emotional resonance and player freedom. It means that developers want their creations to be more than vapid entertainment. Games tend to take themselves seriously - even Bugsnax, though conceptually absurd, is earnest. We don’t often get games that are unapologetically stupid anymore.
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