Geek Out

HOW DO YOU IMPROVE upon perfection? Easy: You don’t.

This holiday season sees remakes of cult classic PC shooter
Serious Sam as well as quirky platformer Earthworm Jim.
Both of these original games still boast rabid followings, and it would
have been easy to upset either fanbase. Yet the remakes’ developers
have somehow pulled it off—the two resulting games should appeal
to new fans and old purists alike, and not just because of their
sub-$20 price tags.

While both remakes add something to the original, it’s also worth
noting exactly how little content they introduce. The only thing
approaching “new” content would be the online leaderboards; otherwise,
Earthworm Jim HD is identical to its 1994 Sega Genesis
predecessor, just as Serious Sam HD is, content-wise, a direct
translation of its 2001 PC iteration.

Perhaps the new Sam‘s success is simply a case of less is
more. The original Serious Sam was an intentional throwback to
the days when shooters (specifically Doom) rarely bothered with
plot. You were given a gun, pointed at some monsters, and you kept
firing until everyone else was a corpse. That “purity” was Sam‘s
key feature, and tacking on extra complexity would run counter to the
game’s inspiration. By merely rebuilding the game’s aesthetics in high
definition, publisher Majesco has kept the Serious Sam spirit
intact. As always, it’s a stylish, frenetic gunfight that will smooch
your adrenal gland for hours.

On the other hand, Earthworm Jim originally succeeded on the
strength of its wacky characters and bizarre setting. Its gameplay was
consistently novel yet intuitive, and only Super Mario World offered as much variety in a platformer. Change any of that and you may
ruin what made the game so special in the first place. As with
Serious Sam, the choice to “just” rejuvenate the original’s
aesthetics ensures that a new generation can appreciate Jim‘s
bizarre quest, while the purists who enjoyed the original won’t
immediately dismiss the game based purely on its looks.