Game:

Altered Beast (1988)

Duration: 3:16

11,639 views

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Original Air Date: September 18th, 2009

I gotta say... this game is terrible. As a fan of sorts of the game (having grown up with the Genesis/MD release), this game is like a blow to the nuts. Yeah, I'm being overly dramatic. Let me say a few things about Altered Beast.

Altered Beast is one of the most cross-platform games ever released by Sega. I can imagine that only a handful of people have played them all. Being released for over a dozen different platforms, the game ranges from the classic Arcade and Genesis/MD game to the terrible TG-16 and SMS game to even the obscure Japan-only Famicom game; Altered Beast has certainly been around. What's so bad about the SMS game?

To its credit, the game looks pretty good for a SMS title and sounds decent, but the gameplay has been jacked up something terrible. The controls are almost unforgivingly stiff, the game flickers too much and it threw in some cheap hits due to the system's limitations. For instance, the monsters can't hide in stones in this game; it would be too much on screen. To keep the enemy count high, some enemies rise out of the ground without warning. If you get stuck inside an enemy, consider yourself dead; there is little to no time to recoil. The boss in this video doesn't even have boss music or take your powers at the end of a level, you just lose them! Oh, and is it my imagination, or does the opening read "RISE FROM YOUR CRAVE"? Ugh... one of the most memorable phrases from my early years put up on the chopping block...

Thank goodness you only need two orbs instead of three to transform in this game because if you don't get enough power before meeting Neff the first time, you probably won't survive the rest of the level.