Maybe I'm more of an "old school" gamer than Mike is, but I appreciated Serious Sam a bit more than he did. I found the game's 36-mission campaign to be more than a simple Doom rehash. Certainly there were moments when I felt a twinge of the old Doom nostalgia (I was a Doom-addict in graduate school), but dismissing Serious Sam as little more than a Doom clone isn't giving the game the credit it deserves.

Serious Sam is an interesting little first-person shooter, developed by a little-known Croatian team, that created some buzz on the PC gaming scene and has now made its way to the Xbox. The Xbox edition is actually two games in one: the original Serious Sam, plus Serious Sam: The Second Encounter.