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System:
MasterSystem
Genre:
Beat 'Em Up
Publisher:
SEGA
Developer:
SEGA
Players:
1-2
Release date/year:
1988
Other systems:
Arcade
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- Altered Beast
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1988 SEGA - SEGA - MS
Again, Sega is known for their action games in the early days. One of their first times out was with Altered Beast in which you take control of a dead soul and fight your way through hordes of the undead to save a girl whom you loved in a past life. Setting a strange standard in the way that action side scrolling games were played, Altered Beast features mindless fighting and endless hordes of enemies that ranged from the disgusting to the mediocre! As you would figure from the name, at certain points, you could morph into a different Beast in different stages with the collection of power-ups.
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-The Game Play-
While not the most inventive, or even the most challenging, the draw of Altered Beast is the fact that the game is so mindlessly simple any gamer of any age or skill could play this on one or two quarters depending on what stage they were at. The game doesn't really offer any difference in the Boss department, in which you fight a different incarnation of the same bad guy throughout the game up until the end! As the game progresses, you collect power-ups that take your character through a change akin to extreme steroid use until they freak out and turn into a beast of various types that range from wolves to tigers to dragons!
The challenge on the other hand is what makes the game an average side-scrolling game. With little or no difficulty in most parts, you’ll find that running through the game in just an hour is standard fare, considering that the game moves at a snail’s pace. The power of your characters is neat and everything, but once you get to that point, you’ll also find that the game just has no more challenge to it. Running through the stages only goes so far, as the game moves automatically and the boss-characters just don’t have enough going for them.
The control that you find here is mindlessly simple, all you have to do is hit the attack button and jump up to other platforms from time to time. Back and forth motion is what this game is all about, and again, any gamer of any age can learn to use the ultra simplistic control to their advantage! Games such as this with the very simple to use control just don’t come along all that often, but you’ll find that in some portions of the game, you just can’t get away from the enemies and you’ll take unnecessary hits!
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-The Visuals-
While well drawn, Altered Beast suffers from an aliment known as image break-up. As the stages go on, and the action gets more and more intense, the images on the screen start to break down from the amount of things going on during the battle. Even though this isn't a complete downfall, it is noticable and very distracting at times! If you add this on to the fact that the enemies in the game really don’t change much from stage to stage, the only thing that you have to look forward to is the boss character. The different incarnations that the boss takes on is something noteworthy, and the imagination used in those battles is something that you’ll remember.
The music is also not the best that can be heard out of any arcade game there is. With flat beats and a very tinny sound that blares from the speakers, the sound effects clash together with the metallic sounding MIDI music that the game was programmed with forcing a massive headache! This is something that I just could not understand with the game, in which the same tune was essentially poured over and over into each stage. The voice effects don’t exist here and you’ll find that without much of the sound effects giving you anything worth listening to, there isn’t anything here that you might find impressive.
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-The Verdict-
While Altered Beast is a grandfather of action, it is a mediocre game with very view innovations, even in it's prime! With the image problems as well as the mindless game play and tinny audio, there isn't much that would or could impress anyone in the arcades today. Quickly fading into obscurity, Altered Beast could probably be considered the first game that stuck in the heads of millions and drove off the appreciation of the next-generation gamers. Worth collecting based on the age alone, Altered Beast is a game worth playing if you want to step back in time.
5/10
//KasketDarkfyre
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