Serious Sam (Windows, 2001)

Ever since the days of Doom, first-person shooters had been slowly but steadily moving away from its original concept, which was basically kill everything that moves. Blake Stone and Marathon experimented with noncombattants that were not supposed to be shot, the latter furthermore added a compley storyline. Duke Nukem 3D featured a rudimentary inventory, certain powerups were not effective immediately but could be carried around and used when necessary.

The came Half-Life. While it was definitely a full-fledged first-person shooter, it introduced even more RPG elements. It put more importance on the story than Marathon ever had. It abounded with scripted events. It had a more realistic world than any first-person shooter before it. It fleshed out the main character and had lots of NPC interaction. And it encouraged a slower, more considerate gameplay. This new concept, dubbed "the thinking man's shooter", was successful, Half-Life became one of the highest selling games in history.

But the game that seemed to deal the final blow to the classic first-person shooter was Max Payne. Max Payne was not even a first-person shooter any more, it was played in a third-person, over-the-shoulder view, but it was aimed at, and played by, the same type of gamer that had enjoyed Quake or Half-Life.

And then suddenly in comes a hitherto completely unknown team of developers from Croatia presenting a game they had been working on since 1996, a game that throws it all overboard, a game with no story to speak of, no NPCs or dialog, no scripted events except suddenly spawning hordes of enemies when you grab a powerful item, just lots and lots and lots of mindless killing.

Especially for Matrox Cards

DualHead

Serious Sam was perhaps the most interesting, or at least the best known, in the short list of games supporting DualHead with the Matrox G400 card. There were two possible uses for the two monitors:

Serious Sam had a split-screen multiplayer feature. With DualHead, both players had a screen of their own, or four players could share the two screens.
In single player, NETRISCA messages (usually, stats of a newly found weapon or an enemy killed for the first time) and cut scenes would pop up on the second screen, thus not interrupting gameplay.

Note that this works with Matrox cards only, not with other dual head cards, which a couple of years later was practically every card on the market.

Surround Gaming

Additionally, the Second Encounter would support Surround Gaming with the Matrox Parhelia from patch 1.50 on. Here the instructions from Matrox website, where they have been meanwhile removed:

Install Serious Sam: SE patch 1.50 beta or later (Required for Surround Gaming)
Under the 'Video Options' menu, choose a 'triple' resolution, eg: 2400×600 (triple)
Press tilde '~' to bring up the console.
Type '/gfx_bSeparateTripleHead=0' or '/gfx_bSeparateTripleHead=1' and hit Enter.
Note: '1' will render three viewports separately, and '0' will render one.

*Three viewports provide better image quality (less perspective distortion) on the left and right monitors, but slower performance.

The Matrox Parhelia Review by Typedef Enum, page 17, discusses Serious Sam and shows a few screenshots.

The TripleHead2Go adapter works with both the first and second encounter.

Especially for ATI Cards

TruForm

Serious Sam is one of the few games that supported ATI's Truform (Radeon 8500 or above). The support was added with patch 1.05. Truform usage is enabled by default, but only for Truform-ready models. Since Serious Sam doesn't have any of such models, you'll need to force Truform usage on all models with cvar /gap_bForceTruform=1. When running Serious Sam under Windows XP with an ATI Radeon 9000, 9200, or 9250, Truform is not applied to OGL models. This can be resolved by installing CATALYST 4.11 Display drivers or higher.

Even when it works, Truform can be something of a mixed blessing. It is basically designed to render organic shapes more realistically, but needs to be told exactly where to apply that (which Serious Sam didn't do, since TruForm support was added as an afterthought), or it will apply that to non-organic shapes as well, as for example this weapon (found here):

No Truform	Truform

This was the main reason that Truform was never widely supported. The one game where it seems to work really well is Morrowind with the unofficial FPS Optimizer. Other games include Half-Life with a later patch (CounterStrike was bundled with the Radeon 8500 LE) and Return to Castle Wolfenstein with patch 1.3.

Not on the German Index

An interesting detail is that no Serious Sam game has yet (as of 2008-05-30) landed on the German index of media harmful for adolescents. This is rather astonishing, since you will find nearly every FPS there.