We use the term ‘classic’ advisedly here. Though
memorably designed, stage 2’s final encounter
could be over in seconds – with a couple of blasts
of your dragon form’s lightning ability, the fight
ended before it had chance to really get going.
CLASSIC BOSS
Back in the ‘80s, the sight of a hungry beast
leaping onto your muscle-bound hero to chew
his face off was presumably rather disturbing.
These days, it looks like a man with his head
stuck in a purple pillowcase.
CLASSIC MOMENT
T
his port of Sega’s side-
scrolling arcade brawler was
more significant for what
it represented than how it
played. At the time, it was a real feather
in Sega’s cap: with the Mega Drive
beating Nintendo’s SNES to stores by
a good 12 months, it could boast that
it had a machine capable of graphics
straight out of the arcade. It was a
slightly misleading claim, as it turned
out: the sprites were far from an exact
match, though the Mega Drive version
did use parallax scrolling, which was
absent from the arcade game.
Most people remember the Mega
Drive version of Altered Beast for its
mangled speech samples, particularly
the infamous “Wise fwom your gwave!”
introduction – though, in truth, it
was more garbled than lisped, and
the “Welcome to your doom!” boss
speech was every bit as unintentionally
hilarious. What remained was a simple
beat-‘em-up that offered meat-headed
pleasures, enlivened by the monstrous
transformations of its hero into a wolf,
an electrically-charged dragon and a
rolling bear. As a pack-in game it did its
job, helping to sell the Mega Drive as a
powerful new console that every gamer
desired.