I’ve been playing Serious Sam II on the XBox for the last couple of weeks. As expected, the game is a great fun. The same cool big open environments, lots of strong colors, sunshine and tons of enemies just like in the first part are all present here. Jokes are still over the top and a bit crude (raw) and there are several references to other famous games and movies. In short, this is the game that does not take itself seriously  (pun intended).

But the highlight of the game is a phrase or two that a few of the monsters scream occasionally. Have in mind that this is a fictional world you’re fighting in and most of the enemies are crazy cartoon-ish creatures. The authors, a company called Croteam, are from Croatia and they speak, well, Croatian (which is for all intents and purposes almost the same as Serbian). So instead of inventing an artificial language that creatures would use, they decided to use Croatian. Imagine my surprise when I heard a deep, deep voice threatening “Sad si nastrad’o!” (“You’re done now!”, liberally translated) coming from a monster. I get a kick every time I hear “Boli me!” (“It hurts!”) while emptying a machine gun into a red devil giant

Knowing the language monsters use makes this game so much more fun , I’d say even hilarious.

P.S. On a related note, I am ashamed to admit that I still haven't properly absorbed French, even after 4 years of living here. I made an on-the-fly resolution to make this year the year of the French language and have been seriously working on it for a month now, at least twice a week. We’ll see what comes out of it.