Characters / Serious Sam - Sam and NETRICSA

Serious Sam character sheets
"Serious" Sam Stone and NETRICSA - Allies - Mooks - Bosses

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"Serious" Sam Stone

Samuel Herbert Stone

Serious Sam / The Last Hope

Voiced by: John J. Dick

"Let's get serious!"

"Over? Oh, it's not over until I teabag every last one of you alien motherfuckers."

The main Player Character of the series. A captain in the Earth Defense Force, he was a part of the exploration crew that accidentally woke up Mental during a race of corporations to be the first to rediscover Sirius, and striken with guilt, he threw himself headlong at Mental's army to try and make amends for what happened.

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• Action Hero: Sam saves the day by blasting villainous scum into smithereens.
• Alliterative Name: Sam Stone.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Among the crimes listed on a Horde wanted poster for Sam in Siberian Mayhem are wanton murder, propagation of rebellion against Tah-Um's empire, reckless driving and inappropriate clothing in battle.
• Amazon Chaser: Serious Sam 4 makes it more explicit that A) he and Hellfire are a thing, and B) Hellfire is basically the distaff version of Sam. There's a side quest late in 4 where they go on a "date" that involves teaming up to murder a couple of hundred aliens.
• Arch-Enemy: To Mental. Sam's mission to take him down spans the entire series and his refusal to die makes him Mental's number one target.
• Atop a Mountain of Corpses:
  • In the box art of The First Encounter HD.
  • At the end of one of the cutscenes in Planet Kleer in II, the mountain being made of Kleer bones.
• Badass Normal: Has no superpowers to speak of outside of the weapons he uses. He's still capable of dealing tons of damage to huge armies.
• Bag of Spilling: Sam loses all his items save for the basic pistol every time he finishes an episode.
• Big "NO!": After he discovers that Mental has already taken the Holy Grail in TSE. Also does this when he's unable to stop Lord Achriman from killing Kenny.
• Blasphemous Boast: Some fan-suggested lines recorded by Sam's actor include ones such as these:
  Sam: Praying to God won't save you now - I fragged him last Tuesday.
  Sam: I am he who gods fear.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: A common trait of Sam's throughout First Encounter, Second Encounter, Next Encounter, and Serious Sam II. Some examples:
  • First Encounter's Alley of the Sphinxes, after the game points out where the four elements that he's collected are to be placed:
    Sam: What're you waiting for, a one-liner?
  • Next Encounter sees Sam breaking the fourth wall with more frequency, such as defeating the game's first wave of Monkey Zombies:
    Sam: You know, studies show that games with monkeys in them are 30% more fun.
  • When fighting Zum Zum at the end of the Magnor levels in II:
    Sam: This game is full of bugs!
• Catchphrase:
  • Sam is very fond of using the word "serious" as well as mentioning finding "some serious firepower" eachtime he crosses paths with a powerful weapon.
  • In II, he tends to yell "I knew it! I KNEW IT!" a lot.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: Sam has no apparent super human powers. This doesn't stop him from tanking hundreds of bullets or multiple anti-tank rockets, ripping grown men apart, gibbing them with quick melee strikes, carrying twenty guns, dodging bullets, sprinting at 60 miles per hour, or accurately getting a headshot on a moving man-sized target, from 300 yards away, using a pistol, while strafing, without looking down the sights.
• Cool Shades: In 4, BFE and TFE. After the latter, he loses them.
• Deadpan Snarker: Sam will sometimes take a break from his one-liners and throw out some good old sarcasm.
  Sam: [walking into a room where an ambush is obviously set up] What are you waiting for, a one-liner??
• Early Installment Character-Design Difference: Sam wears a tanktop in the original version of The First Encounter rather than his more iconic T-shirt from The Second Encounter onwards.
• Embarrassing Middle Name: Sam's middle name is apparently Herbert, though he states in 4 that he "had it surgically removed".
• Expy: Sam is a dark-haired version of Duke Nukem: a one-liner spewing action hero who faces waves after waves of aliens and doesn't take himself too seriously. Other games have enemies, items or characters reminiscent of other series' equivalents.
• First-Person Ghost: You can't see Sam's feet if you look downward.
• Guest Fighter:
  • Appears as a DLC protagonist option in The Talos Principle.
  • Appears in Oh...Sir!! The Insult Simulator along with Lo Wang and the Postal Dude.
  • Appears as a pilot in War Robots.
• Hidden Depths: Despite often seeming like an Idiot Hero, Sam shows himself to be deceptively smart at times.
  • At the beginning of 4, when Carter mentions The Da Vinci Code, Sam gets disgusted. Turns out he isn't a fan of the book. He later reveals that he prefers Philip K. Dick. Even Hellfire is surprised:
  Hellfire: Wait, Sam reads books?
  • Whenever Professor Kiesel uses Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness to describe an optional objective, Sam almost always knows exactly what he is talking about.
  • For all the rancor Sam shows to the aliens he fights, he's consistently respectful and polite to everyone else he meets, particularly women. When contrasted against all his '90s anti-hero qualities, it almost works as part of the overall parody.
• It's Personal: To say that General Brand's betrayal pissed him off would be an understatement, especially when you consider that Brand had Sam's back when he and his crew were almost court-martialled for accidentally waking up Mental.
• Lantern Jaw of Justice: His appearance in the XBox game, Next Encounter, and II has him featuring a rather large, squared-off chin.
• Last of His Kind: By the end of BFE, Sam is the last human standing.
• Lightning Bruiser: Can run at sixty miles per hour while carting around a minigun that's bigger than he is. BFE is not even afraid of showing him running with a goddamn cannon in his hands.
• Mr. Vice Guy: While he's certainly a good guy, he's not without a few flaws, namely, he tends to brag a bit too much about how awesome he is and loves fighting a bit too much.
• My Greatest Failure: According to the original backstory, Sam was the captain of the starship that drew Mental's attention to humanity and he threw himself headlong, even suicidally, into the fighting to try and atone for it.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: See My Greatest Failure above.
• Noodle Incident: Hellfire reminds Sam at the end of chapter 2 of 4 that he's very bad at driving.
  Sam: Want me to drive?
  Hellfire: I don't trust your driving, Stone. Remember what happened in Oslo?
  Sam: Hey! That nun came out of nowhere!
• Not So Stoic: Completely loses his battle-hardened composure when his friends die in front of him.
• Oh, Crap!: He has a couple of these moments, though you can't really feel bad for him when he seems to make it his goal in life to dare the universe to try and screw him over even harder.
• Ominous Message from the Future: He serves as this in TFE, having been sent back into the past to prevent the Bad Future.
• One-Man Army: Nothing else can be expected expect from a classic FPS hero. Massive hordes, massive enemies, massive hordes of massive enemies, doesn't matter, he'll just wreck them all with a witty one-liner on the tip of his tongue. Hell, the final level of BFE has over 2400 enemies, and Sam is perfectly capable of killing all of them should the player be skilled and patient. Someone even compiled a list with the total number of monsters in all the games: 45.723, more than all the other listed First-Person Shooter protagonists combined.
• Parody Sue: He's basically a parody of the fearless FPS protagonist who kills entire armies of monsters/aliens/whatever all by himself that was the default in most early shooters.
• Person of Mass Destruction: Has killed literally tens of thousands of monsters.
• Pre Ass Kicking Oneliner: To be expected from an parody of Duke Nukem.
• Protagonist Title: The titular hero of the series.
• The Stoic: He takes this to Parody Sue levels. Even when he meets Godzilla-sized monsters, his response is just a cheerful "you're a big'un, aint ya?"
• Super-Strength / Super-Speed / Super-Toughness: Sam can decapitate monsters with his bare hands, carry hundreds of pounds of equipment while sprinting at 30 MPH, and take hundreds of bullets, lasers, and rockets before going down. The melee animations on the Beheaded Rocketeers and Cloned Soldiers in BFE show Sam's Super-Strength quite clearly. If the player presses the melee button while Sam's holding the shotgun or pistol near a Cloned Soldier, he kicks the armored soldier hard enough to launch him 10 meters away and through the air. If Sam has any other weapon out, he instead quickly grabs the soldier and snaps his neck in about a second, one-handed and with no mechanical leverage. If the player presses the melee button near a Rocketeer, Sam just straight-up shoves his hand through the poor bastard's chest and out his back, and rips out his heart.
• Tempting Fate: He has a tendency to speak about something unlikely to happen or taunt a fallen enemy... only for a horde of enemies spawning right after his words.
• Who Writes This Crap?!: Has a moment of this when facing Kukulkán in Second Encounter.
  "My flaming fists of fury will destroy you, fiend ha ha ha! God, who writes this stuff?"

NETRICSA

NEuroTRonically Implanted Combat Situation Analyser

NETRICSA / Netty

Voiced by: Elly Fairman (II), Adriene Mishler (Double D)

Sam's head-implanted AI.

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• Breaking the Fourth Wall:
  • At the next-to-last level of TFE, if the player chooses to turn left and head onto the Secret Level, she will be pissed off about Sam taking a shortcut to a valley, away from their main destination, just because he wanted to kill more aliens. She chastises the player for such action.
  • When she starts talking in II, Sam wonders why she didn't before, followed by this reply:
    NETRICSA: Let's just say it has something to do with a bigger game budget.
    Sam: What game budget?
• Characterization Marches On: In The First Encounter (and BFE), NETRICSA is pretty much all business for most of the game, although she occasionally shows some signs of her own personality. Come TSE, she's suddenly cracking a lot more jokes and acting more casual and excitable.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Evident during the Ellenier levels in II, where she cannot hide her jealousness at Sam spending the night with a Kingsburg local lady, something she doesn't forgive Sam for:
  (Kingsburg level briefing) "Why in the world did you shut me last night? HUH? I mean, you never did that before. I remember a ladder being thrown down, and a... a WOMAN! I knew it! You could've at least let me hear what she had to "say". Whatever, who am "I" to know what's going on, right? All you need to do is to find your way to the Church of Rock. And that's ALL I'm going to say."
  (Castle of Rock level briefing) "Well, you saved that poor girl. Plus your aim was poor. Maybe because you spent the night with that... that... morally challenged woman! Now, all you have to do is to reach the Castle Gates. Maybe you will see her again, right? Of course you will, because there is a big Wedding Ceremony behind the Castle Doors. And, of course, you are invited."
  (Floaterra level briefing) "Don't think I didn't see where you were looking back there in the Royal Quarters. Remember, I can see what you see, and YEAH, they are probably fake."
• Expy: In the first game she was essentially just a text interface. In the second game, she strongly resembles Cortana from Halo. She lampshades this as being due to a budget increase.
• Lore Codex: This is her role in all mainline games, with the exception of II. She keeps track of all things Sam faces or discovers such as weapons, enemies, and missions.
• Monster Compendium: One of Nettie's functions in the main games, barring II. Whenever Sam kills an enemy for the first time, NETRICSA will log info about that particular monster.
• Neural Implanting: An AI surgically implanted into Sam's brain.
• Suddenly Voiced: In II she loses her encyclopaedia-like feature in exchange for a voice.
• Promoted to Playable: Is one of the playable characters in Tormental.
• Tempting Fate: In II she has a tendency to speak about something unlikely to happen or taunt a fallen enemy... only for a horde of enemies spawning right after his words.
• Translator Microbes: Actively translates other languages for Sam. This allows Sam to talk to Gnaars, Mental, and anyone else.
• What the Hell, Hero?: She chastises Sam if, instead of heading straight for the Great Pyramid in TFE, he takes a detour to the Sacred Yards instead.
  NETRICSA: I can see you're not listening to me. I told you to go straight to the Great Pyramid. But no, you had to come here. You just wanted to kill some more monsters. You think that saving the world is a joke? You're not serious at all!

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