Beast & Co. alter gaming

As a young lad grow­ing up in the era of arcades (AKA the gold­en age of gam­ing) one of the for­mer kings of gam­ing, Sega was the name that had instant recog­ni­tion with me. From titles like After Burn­er, Out­run, Shi­no­bi, and Vir­tu­al Fight­er, Sega has mas­tered the art of sep­a­rat­ing one from their gam­ing tokens with­out fail. Dur­ing my arcade trav­els, I saw a Sega title that turned out to be not only a clas­sic arcade hit, but also was the inspi­ra­tion for the Bloody Roar series: the revered but maligned Altered Beast for the Genesis.

In Altered Beast, you take on the role of an ancient Roman Cen­tu­ri­on war­rior res­ur­rect­ed by Zeus to res­cue his daugh­ter Athena who was kid­napped by the under­world ruler Neff. As this unnamed war­rior, you do have a small-but-pow­er­ful advan­tage over Neff and his armies: the abil­i­ty to pow­er up into var­i­ous beasts that change the tide of the bat­tle. With this abil­i­ty, the Cen­tu­ri­on war­rior sets off on his divine man­date to res­cue Athena and defeat Neff. 

Game­play of Altered Beast is real­ly sim­ple: As some­one who played side-scrolling games, I instant­ly took to the basic punch, kick and jump mechan­ics. As you go through each ene­my, you’ll get a pow­er-up orb that lit­er­al­ly says “Pow­er-up!”; this made me think that Zeus came down and gave com­mands. On the third pow­er-up, you’ll go into your actu­al beast mode, which con­sists of forms such as a drag­on, were­wolf, were­bear, weretiger, and a gold­en were­wolf, each with their own unique pow­ers. At this point, I’m think­ing that this game is the ori­gin for the pop­u­lar phase “Beast Mode.” At the end of each lev­el, you bat­tle Neff in var­i­ous forms. The graph­ics are pret­ty good for a tran­si­tion from arcade to 16-bit con­sole with lit­tle notice­able dif­fer­ence in qual­i­ty for the time period. 

Altered Beast does have a few flaws: When you defeat Neff at the end of each stage, he some­how takes away your pow­er-up forms as a last part­ing shot, which is obnox­ious. Also, the brief inter­mis­sion scenes are grainy, mak­ing it hard to under­stand what’s going on. On the bright side, the replay val­ue is awe­some for those who want to relieve the gold­en days of the Gen­e­sis and those who want side scrolling action with a mix of horror.

Altered Beast is one of Sega’s clas­sic gems that is wor­thy of anoth­er look. There was a mod­ern-day remake released in 2005 for PS2, but it was crit­i­cal­ly panned. For­tu­nate­ly, Sega decid­ed to give Altered Beast anoth­er look, this time plac­ing it among its oth­er well-known prop­er­ties in var­i­ous TV and film projects. Sega altered the side-scrolling land­scape with this epic tale of good ver­sus evil.