#1 Altered Beast

 "Sir! You forgot your wallet in Panera Bread!"

 These Zombie's heads fly off first before you transform. Its the little things that tend to make me appreciate a game. Headless zombies marching ever onward is a beautiful thing. 

My favorite boss design in the game. He throws his own head at you which regrows instantly. 

When most people think of Sega the first thing that pops into their heads is a certain blue hedgehog. But when we start at the beginning of the Sega genesis lifespan, we won't see hide nor azure hair of him for nearly two years. Sega had several other strategies for trying to get ahead in the US market before Sonic came along. One of which was to be the console for older gamers, and by older I'm still only talking younger teens, with somewhat more mature titles. This wouldn't really last. Sure there would be mature titles in the genesis library, plenty of them, but there was plenty of classic cutesy platformers as well. In all honesty it would not be until the PlayStation that we received the first truly mature focused console with a marketing strategy focused on a 19 year old male demographic.

Another strategy that went along with this was to incorporate a lot of arcade ports, and far superior ones than its NES rival at the time could push out.

Perhaps that is why Sega made the strange move of having this weird little game be its first pack in title with the Sega genesis bundle.

Altered Beast was included in all the first model 1 genesis sales at launch day, so it's pretty common. It was an arcade game first though. Was it popular enough as a coin op to warrant pack-in status? On this I get mixed reports.

Regardless of the logic behind the move, what a weird pack in! Altered Beast is supposed to be a game with a Greek mythology theme. You are a dead centurion who has been resurrected by Zeus with the mission of rescuing Athena from the hands of the sorcerer Neff. I know. Zeus and Athena you recognize...who the hell is Neff?

 This guy.

This is the first really weird thing to me. Neff looks like Hades. He acts like Hades, he basically lives in Hades. Why is he not Hades? Its not like his character, or anyone else for that matter, is fleshed out enough here to really justify creating an original character when Hades we would all recognize immediately.

Also, why is Athena such a push over? Isn't she a war goddess? Granted there really isn't a back story but she doesn't seem to have put up much of a fight and just seems to let herself get captured. And by a mortal. After all, he's not Hades. And here is the other problem with all of this - If Neff is just a normal, albeit magical, guy, not Hades, than why didn't Zeus just smite his ass and take Athena back? If Neff WAS Hades, then it would make sense. Gods aren't supposed to war with each other directly so Zeus sent a champion to deal with Hades in his stead, but Neff isn't a god and there is no rule about kicking his entirely unholy ass.

Maybe this gets to me because the rest of the game is so true to the Greek mythology source material. Remember the story about the giant ants that lived in the volcano from your mythology class? Or who could forget Homer's classic epic about the bipedal rhinoceros wearing boxing gloves and a yellow speedo?

Yeah....Like I said....this game is weird.

But you know what? It's NOT bad. I still say it's an odd pack in. I get that they needed a pack in, and that they needed it to be by Sega, and that Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle wouldn't have fit the image they wanted to create, but Golden Axe seems like it would have been a much better choice. Then again maybe that was the whole idea. Golden Axe is a more popular title, and more traditional, and everyone was going to buy it. Making it the pack in might have lost them money at the time. But I'm just guessing.

You have to give Altered Beast a fair chance - it has to grow on you. You have to embrace its quirkiness, its oddity, and its homoerotic imagery. You have to learn to appreciate the feeling of satisfaction from knocking a zombie's head clean off his shoulders, and laugh at the bad voice synthesizing, and most of all you have to learn to appreciate the game play.

Because the game play is possibly the weirdest part. I don't know quite how to categorize Altered Beast. Its a side scroller. I can establish that much. The screen scrolls like a shmup which forces you to take actions quickly. Its not really a platformer, there isn't all that much jumping. Its not designed like a beat em up either, at least not as I qualify them.....It's just an odd little game. Still it did grow on me. But recently; not so much as a kid. This is one my uncle had and I remembered playing it a few times but it was never a favorite. I'm learning a new appreciation for it only now.

It can be challenging at first if only for the somewhat strange controls that aren't bad just not entirely typical. Altered Beast allows you to ease into higher difficulties smoothly but you have to know how. The options menu is not immediately obvious. 

To access it, you have to press B and start at the opening titles. Here you can adjust your health, difficulty, and number of lives.

Wait...do what now?

This is a game of memorization really, like a shooter almost.  Another big help is that you can actually continue an unlimited number of times. When you lose your last life just hold A and press Start till your back in, starting at the beginning of the last level you played. This isn't even a cheat, its right there in the instruction manual. With only five levels and all these natural adjustments that can be made to game play perhaps Altered Beast's greatest short coming is its length. I can complete the game in about 15 minutes.

However, you do lose your score by continuing. I tend to categorize games based on if they are meant to be completed or meant to be played for a high score. This game has the look and feel of a game played for completion; but with looping difficulty modes that allow you to keep increasing your score round after round till you lose all your lives its actually a score focused game in disguise. A single play through will not be enough to satisfy.

So let me describe the quirky game play in a little more detail.

The screen  scrolls shooter style as you move constantly to the right, fighting off various evil critters as you go. Occasionally two headed wolves will pop up. The consensus is that these look more like pigs. I tend to agree. Which is a shame because a well animated 2 headed wolf would have been awesome, and a major flaw in this game is a lack of animation in certain places (though this shines through only because certain other places have an impressive amount of animation detail. Watch the arms on the tiger when it punches.)

There are two kinds of these wolves. The brown ones are just normal enemies but they might indicate simply by their presence that a silver one is nearby. When you kill a silver two headed wolf a metal orb will float around in a zig zag, ascending pattern. You have to grab these to "POWER UP!" (As your character excitedly exclaims each time) making you bigger, stronger, nakeder, and more homoerotic - till finally, with the third orb, you turn into a beast, a different one (sort of) for each level of the game. GET IT??!! 'ALTERED' 'BEAST'!

You have to transform to even get the chance to fight Neff. If you see him before you are fully transformed he will stand there looking at you like an idiot for a while and then get bored and leave. This seems to take him roughly forever. Neff is a moron. If you're fully powered up he will exclaim "Welcome to your doom!" and transform into a boss monster that you have to fight, then you will be stripped of your power ups and taken to the next level. Some of the boss monsters, particularly the first one, are quite impressive to look at.

After five levels and credits the game restarts at a higher difficulty. This game is best for people who want to play for score. Honestly as a simple action adventure its going to fall short, but if you are one of those players that likes to rack up big points this might be something that interest you, though there are much better games for that out there. Mostly this game is a buy for people who want to start the Genesis at the beginning. It just doesn't fit well enough into any particular category, despite not being a bad game, to be warranted for much else.