Last Week's Games: Fantasy Zone, Alien Syndrome, Altered Beast, Theme Hospital

Yeah, I didn't get to this level.

Needing to fill an hour on Monday Night, I had a go at some of the Arcade games on the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection. My new game for the week was Fantasy Zone, a very colourful shoot-em-up. You play as a small flying ship that looks like it was made from Duplo bricks, and fly around the screen shooting at other creatures invading the land (I couldn’t tell you what any of them are right now!) There are eight larger targets in the level, which take some heavy shooting before they are destroyed. After that, there’s a boss battle, in which the game becomes a Bullet Hell as you try to attack the boss’s weak point while desperately looking for a gap in the projectiles flying at you. I got to the boss on the second level and was defeated, after that my concentration failed and I couldn’t reach that point in the game again, so I moved on. I do want to come back to it though; it was a lot of fun!

I also played Alien Syndrome, which I really enjoyed. I was expecting another side-scrolling beat-em-up when I first saw the game, as you unlock it by getting to a certain point on Alien Storm. But it’s actually a top-down shooter, in which you fight your way through constantly-spawning aliens to rescue your comrades, and once you’ve rescued 10, you go into an arena for a ferociously hard boss battle. It’s a good game, and one I look forward to coming back to in the future!

One game I will be glad not to have to play again is Altered Beast. I played the arcade version of this on the same disc. I didn’t really enjoy it that much but I managed to beat it eventually; you can see it covered in my Backlog Beatdown review. I also persevered with Killer7 for a while; I’m not sure whether I’m “enjoying” it in the usual sense, but I’m finding it intriguing enough to keep going for now at least.

I'll show you the games once
I've played them, alright?

I ordered a copy of Atari Anthology for the PS2, having been persuaded by one of the Metal Jesus videos, and before playing I had a look at the manual to it. With compilation discs, I usually mark the individual games off as complete once I’ve beaten them. One of the problems I was going to have with the Atari games is that most of them aren’t supposed to be “beaten” in any meaningful way. They’re arcade games; you play them until you die and aim for the high score. I wondered how many of the games I’d be interested in playing, because I like to see them through to the end. But Atari fixed this by putting unlockable items in the game; different game modes and interviews etc. Hot Seat mode looks intriguing! So once I’ve unlocked everything, I’ll mark off the whole disc as complete. Otherwise I’ve just taken on 85 games that can’t really be beaten!

Brilliant game, still playing it 20 years later.

Finally, I played Theme Hospital. I downloaded this from GOG a year ago; I have a copy of it on CD-ROM, but the chances I’ll ever get that to work on a modern laptop were slim, so I downloaded a digital version that runs off DosBox. And for a while, I enjoyed it hugely, building the hospitals, researching the cures, trying to let as few people die as possible. It took me right back to when I used to play it in the late 90s! I got to roughly the 8^th or 9^th level (I can’t remember which, it was a while ago!) and played quite a long way in to it before the game crashed and, since Autosave wasn’t a thing back then, and I hadn’t saved the game for a while, I lost a couple of hours of play. I know these things happen, but it’s a dangerous game to play with someone who was already looking forward to the end of the game by then. So I left it for a year, came back to it this week, and played two hours of the level I was stuck on before exactly the same thing happened. Well, darn.

Backlog Beatown: Altering Beasts with Altered Beast

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.