Altered Beast is a side-scrolling beat 'em up game from a time of you when looking at the history of modern video games. Originally released in the Arcade and then brought on to Commodore 64 before hitting the Sega Master System and Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) as release titles, it is a game you'll either love or hate.
The story goes that you, the mightily unnamed warrior, have been summoned back from the dead by Zeus, God of Thunder, to challenge the wicked Neff, God of the Underworld, for the fate of the beautiful Athena, daughter of Zeus.
However, even though in life you were once a brave and awesome Roman Centurion, the trials of this task demand a supernatural display of strength and so Zeus blesses you with the powers of the Altered Beast: the power to transform into a part human, part animal creature of formidable force. But to trigger this empowerment you must earn it through feats of strength and courage by vanquishing your foes and capturing spirit balls to gather the energy to achieve the transformation into one of many forms of the Altered Beast.
Sounds cool, eh? Well back in the late 1980s it was pretty nifty given the graphics were better than Double Dragon and while it was also a two player game, Altered Beast was more forgiving by giving
you the chance to endure more damage before you threw your joystick or keyboard through the monitor.
For its era, Altered Beast boasted good graphics, a stable engine and reasonably responsive controls for you to go to town with in slaying the legions of enemies that came against you. And all of the end of level bosses were different in their own way with story presented to you in brief ten second clairvoyance pieces of what Neff was up to with Athena in between levels while you caught your breath.
However for a game with only five levels that lasted for 20 minutes at the most on the hardest difficulty when you played solo and had every level as basically a rinse-and-repeat of beating up enemies before wailing on the final boss before you moved on, it was definitely a game you only played once before you never looked at it again except for rare returns for two player action or to check out the cool strut that the Werebear form did.
Back when it was first released as a launch title with the Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) it was a good game and I got a lot of enjoyment playing it with my brother before we got sick of it in a month after beating it utterly into the ground and had moved on to Streets of Rage (a vastly superior game). But even before we played it then, we'd both played it (without completing it) on a good friend's Commodore 64 system and got a kick out of it when we came back to it after it's 10 minute loading had finished. But in today's world Altered Beast has aged very badly on all systems it came out on, but none more so than Commodore 64. The Commodore 64 version had a horrendous load time and it's graphics are the worst out of all the incarnations (including against the Sega Master System version). With modern day PCs, this is eliminated and puts the C64 version on par with the Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) and Arcade versions so it is no longer a problem anymore, but even then the game itself isn't enough to warrant more than a curiosity session to waltz down memory lane.
If you're below the age of 10, then you'll get a kick out of it for a while until you've conquered every difficulty.
