Extropia’s Retro-Gaming: Altered Beast

EXTROPIA’S RETRO-GAMING: ALTERED BEAST

If you had purchased a Sega Megadrive (known as ‘Genesis’ in the US) in 1989, then there’s a fair chance you will have played the game ‘Altered Beast’. You might even have played it in an arcade in the previous year. I think it’s significant that this game was originally an arcade release. I’ll explain why later.

But first, what was ‘Altered Beast’ all about? The plot cast the player as a Roman centurion was has been brought back from the dead in order to rescue Athena. You had to walk along a horizontally-scrolling landscape, punching and kicking zombies and other grotesque characters. In particular, you were on the lookout for a gray 2-headed dog. If you managed to defeat this enemy, a ‘spirit’ would be released and absorbing this would transform your character into the kind of beefcake who wouldn’t look out of place in that ‘Fist Of The North Star’ anime.

If you have read other instalments in this series, you will have read about ‘Vixen’, a game in which your character could transform into a fox. ‘Altered Beast’ was so-called because it also featured a character who could transform into an animal. Collect enough of those spirits, and your beefy guy became a werewolf, or a werebear, or a dragon. Each came with special powers.

Now, I did say that it was significant that this was originally an arcade release. On a positive note, this allowed Sega to show off the power of their 16bit console. The graphics were very close to the original, with large and clearly defined character models. It had some memorable speech synthesis too. “Rise from your grave!”, Zeus intoned at the beginning of a level.

On a negative note, probably because it was an arcade port, ‘Altered Beast’ was a short game. That made sense in an arcade, where gaming was typically focused on offering short blasts of gameplay before moving on to the next coin-op machine. But, on a home console, a game that could be completed in under ten minutes seemed far too short to most people.

Still, like I said this game came bundled with the Megadrive so anyone who brought such a console will have received a free copy of what was pretty much an spot-on conversion of an arcade game that, while short, offered a decent game with what were pretty amazing graphics for its day.

Thanks to Sega for the images.