The Serious Sam Franchise has been one of the most popular and most traditional shooters on the PC. Coming out of nowhere (Croatia) and taking the gaming world by storm, both Serious Sam and Serious Sam: The Second Encounter have done very well with the GamesFirst! reviewers. Now, Gotham Games and Croteam have put together an Xbox version of Serious Sam, combining both of the PC games and all jazzed up for better graphics and intense four player action. Don't miss our interview with Davor Tomicic, Game and Level Designer for Croteam.

It\'s a common problem for those of us of the videogame loving persuasion. How can you get your loved one to love games as much as you do? It\'s a very practical problem, as games can take hours and hours to enjoy and love or family life can take similar amounts of time. Our ever-helpful mistress of the console box, Monica, delivers some useful guidelines for sharing your loves. Click here for the article.

Here at Gamesfirst! we like to talk about games--interactive art, we'll tell you, and the future of art and storytelling”a force more powerful and more frightening than its parent, the movie, or its grandparent, the stage”both terrifying in their own way, in their own time. But did you ever wonder where the word "videogame"came from? "Video" meets "game"--it sounds like a pretty straightforward etymology to get to the word that brings us all so much joy, but what we have here is a strange union between two ancient words who's roots stretch across recorded time”and further, in fact, into the dark night of prerecorded time.

All the boothbabes, mascots, gratuitous game displays, and goofy GamesFirst! correspondents you could ever hope for are right here in our E3 Photo Gallery 2002. We\'ve got all the glory of the world\'s biggest videogame exposition packed into these pages. Click here to view the gallery.

Three years ago, Rick Fehrenbacher and Al Wildey bought GamesFirst! Although founded in 1995, GF! had been left to languish after the previous editor, a friend of Rick and Al's named Zap Reicken, decided he could no longer maintain the site. At the time of the Rick and Al's takeover, dubbed GamesFirst! 2.0, the site averaged 300 visitors per day. I came on board as the site's first console game reviewer. As Rick described so eloquently in his editorial last year, the consoles section and GF! grew together. A few games trickled in from Activision and a handfull of other games publishers for console systems, and those kept me busy for the remainder of the year.

Dan Birlew is the author of several strategy guides for BradyGames, including Resident Evil 3 and Vagrant Story, and has been assigned to the SquareSoft roster of games. He has and is covering new Square titles like Parasite Eve II, Chrono Cross, and Final Fantasy IX. Birlew has a reputation for high quality work, and a distinct dedication to his craft. GamesFirst!, represented by yours truly, was lucky enough to sit in on a press roundtable discussion with Birlew and Detra Perry, PR Representative for BradyGames. Also in attendance were correspondants from Just Adventure, GameSpin, GameWeek, and The Computer Show. We all had a really nice, and quite long, discussion, ranging in topics from the nitty-gritty construction of a strategy guide, to linquistic and style considerations, to the future of strategy guides and gaming. It was all so fascinating that I followed up the interview with a few more questions, nagging Birlew about some of the deeper issues involved in gaming in general. You can find the GF! Exclusive Followup to the Dan Birlew Interview here, and keep reading to get the rest.

Dan Birlew is the author of several strategy guides for BradyGames, including Resident Evil 3 and Vagrant Story, and has been assigned to the SquareSoft roster of games. He has and is covering new Square titles like Parasite Eve II, Chrono Cross, and Final Fantasy IX. Birlew has a reputation for high quality work, and a distinct dedication to his craft. GamesFirst!, represented by yours truly, was lucky enough to sit in on a press roundtable discussion with Birlew and Detra Perry, PR Representative for BradyGames. Also in attendance were correspondants from Just Adventure, GameSpin, GameWeek, and The Computer Show. We all had a really nice, and quite long, discussion, ranging in topics from the nitty-gritty construction of a strategy guide, to linquistic and style considerations, to the future of strategy guides and gaming. It was all so fascinating that I followed up the interview with a few more questions, nagging Birlew about some of the deeper issues involved in gaming in general. You can find the GF! Exclusive Followup to the Dan Birlew Interview here, and keep reading to get the rest.

This past summer I reviewed bleem!, a Playstation emulator introduced at E3 last spring. We rarely revisit software titles but because of the ongoing legal battles between bleem! and Sony, and the recent release of version 1.5b, we at GamesFirst! decided to take a second look. The initial review can be found in it's entirety here; let's get this updated review started by sharing a December 13, 1999 press release:

Well, this week GamesFirst! will be featuring even more E3 coverage, this time covering the PC side of the street. Over the next several days, I\'ll be listing my E3 Best Ofs, starting today with Best Party, Booth, and Awards Presenter, and ending this weekend with my Best Games of E3 list. In the meantime, we\'ll continue to preview this year\'s upcoming PC and console titles from E3.

We've been looking for a way to answer everybody's questions about bleem! For Dreamcast, and figured what better way to do so than to go straight to the horse's mouth, so to speak. The makers of bleem! have been gracious enough to allow us to post their FAQ on GamesFirst! With so many rumors spreading around the Web, it can be hard to get the straight facts about this exciting new version of the "best little emulator ever made." So here you go “ the real deal: