Switch Release: Serious Sam TFE and TSE ports released
If you’re interested in ports of FPS games to the PSVita and Switch, then you’ve probably head of fgsfds as he’s ported Half-Life 1 to the PSVita and Quake I/II/III to the Switch among other many titles. Now, he’s released a port of Ryan C. Gordon’s fork of the Serious Engine for hacked Nintendo Switch consoles which lets you play both the classic versions (not the HD remakes) of Serious Sam The First Encounter (2001) and The Second Encounter (2005); both of which are pretty well-received FPS PC titles of last decade.
According to the port’s release thread on GBATemp, the port is a tad janky and barebones and comes with a few issues which include:
- Long loading times
- Performance isn’t great, especially in some levels, due to dynamic lights
- Thankfully, these can be disabled by changing the ‘shd_iAllowDynamic’ option in Scripts/PersistentSymbols.ini although some levels depend on having them enabled to be fully playable
- The demos that come prebundled with the game are desynchronised
- While it has multiplayer support, most PC servers run version 1.07 of the Serious Engine but the Switch port is based on version 1.10 so you may not be able to play on many of them
- The framerate is quite low in the menus and the NETRICSA menus can’t be controlled although they can be quit from by pressing the ‘+’ button
- Other than these, there are some peculiarities detailed in the ‘Notes’ of the GBATemp thread linked below which you should surely read about.
