Serious Sam 3:BFE PC Review

Serious Sam has earned ‘cult’ status on the PC platform. The first two titles proved to be big sellers for Croteam, targeting the first person shooter audience who just wanted a good old ‘run and gun’ style experience. I have been playing the latest iteration in the series now for the last week and have found it both fun, and is really an incredibly challenging game.

Croteam have followed the same structure as the previous titles – a very clever mix of letting the gamer rest for a few moments to collect powerups and weapons, followed by a 15 minute maniac session of rampant fragging. It may sound like a mindless shooter, but in reality, the pacing is actually very clever.

Most of you reading this will already know if you are going to like the game, because it doesn’t really break any new ground. If you hated the first two titles and yearned for a sophisticated plot, resplendent with puzzles then you are not going to find pleasure with SS3 BFE. This is at heart, an old fashioned shooter with a very nicely updated engine to bring the franchise screaming and kicking into 2011.

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Top 10 - Best Game Over Screens

Today, we’ll cover one of those things a gamer never wants to see. No, we’re not talking about frame drops, random encounters or a broken camera. We’re talking about the dreaded Game Over screens. Maliciously waiting for any mistake to jump on you and tease you with their messages while you lament yourself, they have been an integral part of gaming since the first games were made. Most of the times, they would simply show a “Game Over” screen that’s just plainly boring. But, every now and then, there’s a game that does more than that, a game so twisted that it enjoys picking on you for your fail. Or maybe it feels sorry for you and wants you to have a good laugh, even in defeat. We picked the ones that, in our opinion, are the 10 best ever game over screens, ten screens that go a bit further than just tell you that you lost.
So, without further ado, let the top 10 begin

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Face Recognition on Facebook Mobile?

Face.com’s CEO has shrugged off rumors that it is being acquired by Facebook for up to $100 million when asked. But the addition of its facial recognition tech to Facebook’s mobile apps could make sure friend tagging continues as the social network’s user base shifts away from desktops.
In fact, about 45% of users of Face.com’s app KLIK end up sharing their photos on Facebook, which shows how popular mobile facial recognition could be.
For the record, Face.com people are keeping their cards close to their chest. Face.com’s CEO Gil Hirsch flatly tells: “We have nothing new to announce or share at this time.”
But even while Facebook has been pushing a lot of fancy new enhancements to its mobile offerings (its Camera mobile app being the most recent) there are still a surprising number of features that have yet to be covered by the company.
So, perhaps because nature abhors a vacuum, we’re now getting a full whack of reports of what the company might buy or launch to make up for that, including today’s Face.com news that Facebook is looking to buy mobile/PC browser company Opera and hiring ex-Apple hardware engineers to work on its own phone.
We may just, quite possibly, be in the middle of a Facebook news bubble and that half of what we are reading about Facebook and mobile may never come to pass — or could take ages to come to fruition: Buffy the Android slayer is reportedly still six to 12 months away going by the timing in the AllThingsD post from November. And this is not the first time we’ve heard that Face.com is in the Facebook acquisition line.
But, if you swallow that large grain of salt, there is a huge amount of sense in the social network looking at beefing up its mobile arsenal with companies like these, which offer features that Facebook currently does not, and therefore offer the promise of getting mobile users to spend more time on the social network — something that is a concern for the company.

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