Waaaay classic side-scrolling beat-em-up that has all the trappings of late 80's video game design. Still should be rad co-op, though!

Also: WISE FROM YO GWABE

Altered Beast is a short arcade-style 2D Action game. Or you can call it one-plane beat-em-up. Supports for up to two players coop. It was first developed for Arcades in 1988 by Sega of Japan's arcade division, Team Shinobi, also known as Sega AM1 later on. Who also got misspelled as "Team Sinobi" in credits of this port, ha! Then around 1989 it got ported by Sega of Japan on Sega Mega Drive, being fitted into 4 Megabit cartridge. Sega used to call those megabits as MEGA POWER. Also, it's bits, not bytes.
It became a pack-in title for console in most western regions, before Sonic took over as pack-in app. So most wouldn't complain about how short it was.
Also it got ported to various consoles as well, like Sega Master System, Turbo-Graphx 16, CD one and NES. Yes, some Sega titles were on those consoles, as unbelivable as it is. Most of them are inferior in various ways, though NES port had original levels, too bad that core gameplay sucked there. Arcade still is the best.

The game that you have here is nothing more than emulation of Sega Genesis version.


Now, for usual technical part about Sega's emulation here:
The Sega Classic games that you purchase on Steam count as DLCs for "Sega Mega Drive & Genesis Classics" game that should appear in your library.
By default it runs 3D bedroom Hub. Since emulator itself is based on 2006 one made in Java and 3D Hub is made in Unity, both famous for having not-good optimization, the performance in this hub varies from one PC to another. Sound lags as well.
It's recommended to run Simple Launcher, which can be done by Right Mouse Clicking the Sega Classic title in Steam library and selecting it. It still isn't perfectly accurate emulation, but it's acceptable. Sadly, it doesn't have user-friendly access to mods.
However, Simple Launcher has it's fair share of glitches as well. It can crash. And it does the second time you go to main menu, so always quit after saving there so it doesn't crash when you want to save next time! Also, yes, emulator supports quick saves.
As alternative, you can use external emulator to run games that you purchased. Kinda like when people use ZDoom source port to run Doom on Steam. Sega kindly placed in all games that you purchased in "uncompressed ROMs" folder that program itself doesn't use, the file for this one being "ALTEREDB_UE.68K".
I also demand you to read digital manual of this game first. You can find it here on store page or go to "manuals" folder of game root and open "AB_PC_MG_EFIGS_US.pdf".

While the game has multiplayer mode for two players, the emulator doesn't have any online function for that, so it's local only.


You play as a "brave and awesome" Roman Centurion, 'Wisen Fwom Yo Gwave' by Zeus to rescue his daughter, Athena, from the sweaty arms of Neff, the god of underworld. So you are off to beat the 5 short stages. It actually has quite an interesting sorta-Japanese take on ancient Greece style, where beasts and demons clearly didn't come from the mythology but rather developers own creations who still kinda fit in style. Each stage introduced new monsters and boss, so it's quite fancy to see all the weirdness.

By the way, talking of 'Wise Fwom Yo Gwave', which is a voice of Zeus that plays at beggining of a game. In reality, Sega Genesis's chip could handle sample playback just fine. "It sucks" is just a myth, guys. Samples are the pre-recorded sounds, which means that it's instruction containing info on vibration on each "step", speaking in my uneducated understanding. They are often used for drums and voices. And yes, even NES could have high-quality music with samples. The big problem is that they take huge space on ROM. The better quality the more space it requires and more ROM means higher manufraction cost. Thus it often didn't have good quality. SNES would get away with forced filtering on sound chip output, so lower quality samples could be used without it sounding scratchy.

Now, what can I say about the gameplay. It's a usual 2D action game, where the screen will slowly scroll while you are taking out the spawning enemies. You have punches and kicks, and unlike many early one-plane beat-em-ups each has it's use, with different collisions. All of them are useful in each situations. It's amazing how I seen some people thinking that kicking up while crouched is useless, it's good against flying monsters and the dogs jumping from above. And level design has enough verticality in gameplay, with various platforms, which puts it over the many early one-plane beat-em-ups.

Even more, you was given the power to transform into the beast from powerups that white two-headed wolves drop upon death in order to save Athena. They often travel in pack with brown wolves, so you can usually predict when albino one is about to pop-up. After death they drop a flying power ball that you have to catch to level up in strenght. The first two times they work like steroids, turning into into macho. And the third one you will turn into furry that is unique to each stage, aside from the last one, having powerful attacks, wrecking stage until you meet Neff, who will transform into boss only if you have anthro shape. Though in Genesis version he will always become a boss the third time you meet him, instead of looping stage. Too bad that three out of five bosses have cheap tactics to beat.

Overall, yea, it's arcade experience in a sense that you have game over and have to start again if you lose all lives. By default you have same amount of lives as if you put a single coin into arcade. But the object layout for each stage of Genesis got changed a bit to be easier on default difficulty. Seeing how they don't have any rock object to break, level 2 sure feels too flat. Not to mentioning that it annoyes me the strange lack of background graphic on top of screen there. But yes, since it's short, it's not hard to memorize and learn to beat stages easily after a while. Not to mentioning that three out of five bosses have easy cheap tactics.

And then you can continue after game over by pressing A+Start at title screen. B+Start at it brings options menu, where you can change difficulty and health, lives count. Actually, if you beat game, it sends you back to beggining with difficulty increased. Difficulty increase just changes layout of placement of enemies and makes some bosses throw more projectiles, so it's actually cool and not lame. Also, it has cheat (as in not in manual) menus for sound test and menu where you can select beast form for each stage. Cool.

Music is also still enjoyable. While arcade credits sequence where it turns out that it was all the movie, telling it through still images, was cut, it still has awesome credits song.

While game was ported to Genesis, it surely took hit in graphics, quality and animations. However, they decided to add parallax to most levels.
What is parallax? It's when background is separated into different layers that move at different speed, giving it the feeling of depth. It was called as 3D effect in early 90s.
And while SNES's main attraction was Mode 7, aka rotating around a single background layer, Sega Genesis was all about Parallax abuse with ten layers or so. So pay attention to those for fun.

It also has multiplayer if second player presses start at title screen. It's same as usual, no friendly fire or anything special, just two Centurions on steroids. The only difference is that albino wolves throw two spirit balls. And yep, one can take them both.

But yea, it's short and wouldn't last much more than hour of mastering (or 10 minutes of beating once you get it down), but still enjoyable arcade one-plane beat-em-up game, with leveling quickly on each stage varying it up. And it was pack-in, so oh well.

edit: I played this game in arcades when it was first released, as we well as on console. It was not a very good game then, and it's an even worse game now when we have so many thousands of alternatives. This is my opinion, enjoy having your own as well. But, IMHO, this is one of the weakest games offered in this Sega collection.

edit 2: There is a remake for GBA called "Altered Beast: Guardian of the Realms", which I have never tried. The review on IGN states:

A fun remake of a bland Genesis game... and it's rare to say that a Sega remake, developed by a US studio, is better than the original.

-which reinforces my comments on this Genesis version. If you want to play Altered Beast, it may be worth trying that updated one instead.

Original review and comment:

Description via Wikipedia:

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Altered Beast (獣王記 Jūōki?, lit. "Beast King's Chronicle") is a 1988 beat 'em up arcade game developed and manufactured by Sega. The game is set in Ancient Greece, and follows a centurion who is resurrected by Zeus to rescue his daughter Athena, and to do so becomes able to turn into beasts such as the werewolf with the use of power-ups. After its initial arcade release, it was ported to several home video game consoles and home computers, including the Sega Mega Drive, for which it was a pack-in game. The primary designer was Makoto Uchida, also responsible for the creation of Golden Axe.

Overall, a very shallow game, which I do not recommend. Most people these days will probably get it in the pack, on sale, which is fine. There are only a handful of stages and enemy types in the game. Each stage takes at most a few minutes to complete. The original devs attempted to draw out the game by making it scroll automatically very slowly, making you wait for the game so you can progress. Also, you only get a few lives, with no heals and no continues, again to artificially increase the playtime forcing people to start from the beginning of the game every time.
Fortunately, this runs in an emulator, so you can make your own save between levels or a quick save anytime you want really, however, that will make the game considerably easier than it already is. You'll very likely complete the game in your first play session anyway.

The game can be speedrun from start to finish in under 10 minutes if you know what to do. Seriously:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOnc32trsjk