History VideoGame / SeriousSamNextEncounter

''Serious Sam: Next Encounter'' is a FirstPersonShooter videogame developed by Climax Solent and published in April 2004 by [[Creator/TakeTwoInteractive Global Star Software]] and Gathering of Developers for the UsefulNotes/PlayStation2 and UsefulNotes/NintendoGameCube. It's a {{spinoff}} of the ''VideoGame/SeriousSam'' series.

* ShinySense: Ammo glows yellow, health red, armor blue, weapons green, and key items purple.

* [[DualBoss Trio Boss]]: The Hydra boss has three heads: one fires rockets, [[KillItWithFire one blows fire]], and [[EnergyWeapon one shoots a laser]]. They have to be fought at the same time.

* [[DualBoss Trio Boss]]: The Hydra boss has three heads: one fires rockets, [[KillItWithFire one blows fire]], and [[FrickinLaserBeams one shoots a laser]]. They have to be fought at the same time.

** And finally, the Arachnoid enemies from the first game are replaced with a new similar scorpion-like enemy with mini-guns for arms.

* FlunkyBoss: In a fashion similar to ''TSE'', the game puts Sam against [[spoiler:Diabloid]] and [[spoiler:Sirian Overlord]] with plenty of baddies in their respective battles.

* RunningGag: Each of the three eras have a spot where Sam remarks something in the level reminds him of when he met first/second/third wife and then lament that "it's a shame what happened to her" [[NoodleIncident without elaborating]].

* ATasteOfPower: The first level has Sam spawning in with a minigame and a bucket of homing ammo, and lets you go to town against hordes of [[TheGoomba Dums-Dums]] in a large flat area. The level ends with Sam being beamed out of the coliseum and teleported elsewhere in Rome, where the game then progress in typical ''Serious Sam'' fashion.

* ScoringPoints: ''The Next Encounter'' has the most complex scoring system in the series. Players get extra points from chaining kills in short succession. If the player manage to chain 20 kills, then Sam enters a SuperMode where he moves much faster and gets 2 times the point value on every enemy killed, and then an additional increasing for the number of enemy killed when it ends. The end of level result screens also gives extra points for every enemy killed above the PAR count, every second under the PAR time and a fixed amount of points for finding every secrets in the level.

%% * GangstaStyle: The Uzis.

* BagOfSpillings: The games handles weapon retention in an odd way: While continuing from one level to the next will have the player retain whatever weapons and ammo they had collected up to that point, reloading a checkpoint or loading the level from the main menu will instead have the player start with a pre-defined weapon loadout, which often mysteriously lack guns that were mandatory to collect in the previous level. The more

* NoGearLevel: ''NE'' has predefined weapon sets at the beginning of each level, which means that whenever you find a secret place with a new weapon, you have to exploit it '''now''' because you'll lose it by the end anyway. It gets more ridiculous between ''The Three Halls of Harmony'' and ''The Beast Beneath The Temple'' stages: on the first, you officially possess the cannon (it's not hidden anywhere), then it disappears heck knows where until the boss battle.