Serious Sam has always been a series that happily thumbs its nose at the more serious sensibilities of the first-person shooter genre.
While Half-Life and BioShock were crafting increasingly realistic stories around their shooting mechanics, Serious Sam was more concerned with making its guns bigger, and its enemies increasingly ridiculous.
But no accessory more fully displays the Serious Sam philosophy than its latest abomination, a minigun designed to work with Serious Sam VR on the HTC Vive. And we got to give it a twirl.
A DIY monster
The team were quick to point out that the minigun is meant as a prototype design only, and that they currently don't know if it will ever see a full release.
But despite this the gun itself looks and feels well-made.
At the centre of what makes the gun work is a single HTC Vive controller that's working with the software to place the gun in the virtual space.
You don't actually hold the controller itself though. Instead you have your right hand on a joystick, which has been jerry-rigged to work as the controller's trigger.
This same trigger is also attached to a drill, which allows the end of the minigun to turn when you're firing the gun in the game.
Real gun, virtual world
Using such a big gun has a pretty big impact on how you end up playing the game. Although the peripheral isn't exactly heavy, its size alone means that you move it more slowly, which did make it more difficult to deal with wave after wave of Beheaded Kamikazes (the headless men with bombs for hands that run at you screaming).
But we'd be lying if we said it wasn't enormous fun to mow them down with the minigun, and were it not for the small harem of HTC employees watching us we would have happily been pulling off our best impressions of the Heavy from Team Fortress 2.
The only problem? The VR headset means that you can't actually see the minigun in-game, meaning that you are left with its virtual representation to enjoy.
Thankfully you'll be able to enjoy the sight of the minigun in the video below, which the folks at HTC have cleverly been able to overlay into a real-time stream of my gameplay.
- Check out our list of the best VR games.
