I wasn’t quite ready to get off my Pick-Up-And-Play train, so
I had a look at some of the Arcade games on the Sega Megadrive Ultimate
Collection, including Altered Beast – Arcade. I’d had a go at the Megadrive
port when I played through some of the games during the original No Game New
Year, and I didn’t enjoy it all that much at the time. I expected something a
little different from the Arcade edition, but it was more or less the same game
again.
 |
| I actually thought these were two separate pictures... |
The premise is that you are a Greek Centurion (and that’s
wrong for a start; Centurions were Roman) who is raised from the dead by Zeus
to rescue his daughter Athena from the evil Neff (and a quick Google search of
Neff Greek Mythology only contains links to the game, so I’m not sure Neff’s
even a part of Greek Mythology at all.) Not exactly Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,
but hey, it’s a 1989 arcade game; no one is thinking about the plot too
closely.
You punch and kick your way through undead hordes,
two-headed wolves, demons and several boss battles, and for the most part, this
is actually not very good at all. Your character moves slowly, and attacks even
slower. You have to plan your punches around still wanting to punch the enemy
half a second later. There is a strategic element to it – punches are quicker
but kicks have more reach, and if you duck and kick he’ll attack upwards, – and
you become familiar with what attacks are best against certain enemies, but there
are so many that it’s a chore to get through the levels.
The conceit of the game is your transformation. When you
defeat a certain enemy, (a white two-headed wolf although this is different
across different versions of the game,) it drops a power ball; pick this up and
you become steadily more muscular and powerful, and if you pick up three, you
change into a human/animal hybrid. What you become depends on what level you’re
playing. In order, they are: Werewolf, Dragon, Bear, Tiger and Werewolf again.
The game comes alive then; your character moves and attacks much faster, having
ranged attacks and in some cases an area-of-effect move. I found myself
thinking that this should have been the game right from the start. Sega could
have developed five different games out of the move set for each creature and
it would have been better than Altered Beast.
 |
| The Transformation Screen. Looks like bear-faced cheek to me. |
But the main problem with the game is the balance. The
enemies attack you in waves that your character just doesn’t have the speed to
deal with, and some of the boss battles – the second one in particular – are
all but impossible to beat without losing at least a few lives. Playing as the
beast is the best part of the game but it takes far too long for this to
happen. I understand that it was an arcade game, deliberately designed to be
very difficult in order to entice quarters away from the paying public. But on
a home console, this increased difficulty is incredibly frustrating. I beat the
game, but I’m sure that the only reason that I managed it is that this version
of the game has unlimited continues; you can keep going potentially
indefinitely.
The tone of this post probably makes it sound like I don’t
like this game very much. Well, in fact, I don’t. I know it’s an old game, and
they were more difficult than current or previous generation games. The games
that have stood the test of time are difficult as well – but not at the expense
of fun. Altered Beast is a ferociously hard game; the difficulty in the levels
feels cheap, but the unlimited continues remove the challenge from the game.
One wonders why the game was in such reverence as to be included on the
compilation disc; most likely it is because this game tended to be packed in
with the early Sega Megadrives before Sonic the Hedgehog was released a couple
of years later. So it has nostalgic value, but as I had no investment in
Altered Beast prior to this compilation, this isn’t enough for me.
No comments:
Post a Comment