So I was browsing away on here and came across Detchibe's list called "Against the Grain", it was about games they had differing opinions on from the norm. Kindly ignoring the Castlevania: The Adventure entry, I took notice in the appearance of Altered Beast. Instantly I was reminded of the overbearing negativity some seem to have for this title, it was as if Altered Beast had stolen Christmas and punched their mothers square in the jaw. I would hear suggestions that this should sit on the bench of shame and rub elbows with the likes of Bubsy 3D and Superman 64, which is completely insane to me. As always it's not great to hear someone take a massive dump on one of the many games of your childhood, but it kinda hurts a ton more when it's a common opinion and not some random shitter or a Netflix-browsing troll with a wordpress doing their best Armond White impersonation.

Don't get the wrong idea, I don't think Altered Beast could last even ten seconds against Bare Knuckle III or that it would even get close to a Top 50 for my personal favorite Genesis games list, but the idea that it's "one of the worst ever" just confounds me beyond all words. Curious as always, I decided to boot up my crappy loose copy of Altered Beast that somehow still functions and gave it a spin on the ol' 16-BIT machine. It was time to rescue Zeus' daughter once again.

I played it, rose fwom my gwave, punched out some zambambos, powered up, beat it and mildly enjoyed myself.

So what's the problem here? What am I missing?

Did you boot up the game on an emulator for a minute, get your ass kicked and proclaim the game sucked and ragequit? Did the sight of the man turning into a wolf trigger your crappy anti-furry kneejerk reaction? Did you forget to press B while fighting the eyeball monster? Were you filtered by the adorable little dragon riding the fireball orb? Was your ass thoroughly handed to you by the mean rhino man at the end of the game? It's one thing if it simply isn't your cup of coffee, but to proclaim it one of the worst ever is a tad much.

Just absolutely strange to me. It's not the highest praise, but this is easily one of the better pre-Final Fight beat'em ups and I will hear nothing else. I suggest playing Heavy Nova for five seconds, you'll be singing Altered Beast's praises and begging for forgiveness in no time. Now I'm gonna go ahead and implement something that the kids quite enjoy, which will be my verdict for those who apply their worst rating to a memorable game that is a big part of the Genesis's history:

clears throat

Skill issue.

You know, I thought ET on Atari and perhaps Scorn, even knowing it's an acquired taste would be the only times this year I got absolutely bewildered over a game's negative perception, but this might take the cake.

Like legit I can't even think of anything super negative about it outside of Stage 4 being annoying, it's over so quickly and you're pretty much a powerhouse from start to end that any actual problems dissipate with ease.

This might actually be the most 5/10 thing ever made.

These are my live notes as taken while attempting to play through Altered Beast for the first time:

Huh. This is pretty slow.

The main character sprite is pretty ugly. Why is his head so tiny??

I can see this getting really repetitive

Wait, powering up is just removing clothing?

Okay, he's even more jacked but that just accentuates his already-tiny head

WHOA

Okay this werewolf is AWESOME

What's this lightning guy? Why can't I hit him?

What does he mean "Welcome to your doom?"

WHAT IS THAT

SERIOUSLY WHAT IS THAT

Okay, I get it now, the lame human tinyhead man is a contrast to the awesome werewolf character, it makes you want to transform and you appreciate the werewolf more when you change into him, got it.

Gotta kick a bunch of purple goo so I can be the werewolf again

WHAT

A DRAGON

HOW MANY FORMS ARE IN THIS GAME

These foreground rocks are hiding a LOT of holes

Can I even jump across these??

Okay it's a good thing I'm on NSO with rewind, I would have absolutely blown all my lives trying to figure out how to jump high

These stinging mantis bug guys are horrifying

Okay aaaaaaaand BEAR

BOUNCING BEAR

Is this a snake statue? Is it alive? What am I fighting here?

No seriously, I can't figure out how to damage this thing

Ooooh the bouncing hurts the top of the statue

Okay this next stage seems simple enough

Ooh Tiger! Tiger is good

Skeleton Lava Croc Fetus?

Okay I hate this thing

I hate Skeleton Lava Croc Fetus so much

UGH THAT TOOK SO LONG

You know what, I have barely any life left. Go ahead and kill me, weird Satyrs. I'm out.

This game's level of Jank Difficulty is absolutely miserable, I'm gonna go watch a speedrun now to see how anyone can actually finish this mess.

When i was a kid i went to my friends birthday party and some dumbass i never met before was playing this on my friends wii and i thought it looked cool so i asked

"What is that game"
Then he was like "i dunno"
Then i said "Well youre playing the game what the cr*p is it"
He responds "i dont know"
I beg "Do you know the name of the game atleast"
He grimaces and says "no"
...."Can i p-
"no"

So i leave the room and come back and the game is paused so i sit down and continue playing and according to my mom because at this point in the story for whatever reason shes sitting down near the couch that im playing the game on. The kid from before comes back and says "thats my game give it back" and im like "What" "dude give me my game back youre mean" For some reason according to my mom i just stare at him for 1 minute straight emotionless and he just leaves i have no recollection of this

Anyway, the game fucking sucks but it takes an hour to beat so if you want to digest some slop bone apple tit

i like the idea of this game a lot with it's progression system of collecting power ups that let you turn into a super powered beast form to fight the stage boss. i also think its cool that each level with the exception of the last has unique transformations with unique attacks. i also think theres a bit of charm with the way the game looks and all the bit crushed voice clips and stuff. thats pretty much where the praise ends though. the game is just kinda janky as hell. theres all sorts of shit the happens that i find so dumb like getting hit during transformations, the way you can just jump and spam kick over and over again and it kinda works sometimes, the way you can get hit and not lose health sometimes but get hit by the same thing and lose health, just weird inconsistent stuff like that. also maybe im just stupid and didnt look around enough but i couldnt find anything like health pickups or extra lives, and the game doesnt have continues at all. even though the game is short its still kinda difficult and in a bad way that inflates the amount of time it takes to beat. i got to the final boss but had practically no health left and no lives, and i dont think its possible to not take damage to the final boss so it feels like you have to get there without taking any or minimal damage and lose no lives which i just cant do, so i gave up. overall, cool game concept, reallll shit execution

This is a weird one because I definitely respect it on a base level and think the idea is cool however I just think it’s relatively unimpressive and kinda boring to play. Still I’m happy this helped put the genesis on the map but later games would greatly improve and show off how great the genesis could truly be. Besides there’s better genesis games from the late 80s like ghouls n ghost and revenge of Shinobi. To me this feels like a below average nes beat ‘em up game with some slightly more detailed graphics thanks to it being 16 bit.

If you want something similar yet way better play the splatterhouse games.

Considering the bad reputation Altered Beast has, I don't mean to defend it from the hate it's got. Why make a personality out of dissing old games? This is a 1988 title, a port of an arcade game, I don't want to gatekeep you saying "you had to be there" to understand, but the full potential of playing basically an arcade game on your home console wasn't lost on anybody at the time. I wasn't there specifically, but I remember playing Tekken 3 on the PS1 as a kid and feeling the same sense of wonder about the future of videogames. Generation after generation we all have had the same expectations about the future.

Altered Beast is by no means a masterpiece but it's funny. It's hard and controls aren't intuitive (did you know you can kick up by crouching and kicking?), but bit by bit I reached the end of the game and saved the day. If you don't consider every restart, since every time you lose all lives you go back to the beginning, the game doesn't last long, but it gave me something: everytime the player would power up twice and he'd become this big mountain of a man, when hit he'd be laying down on the grass in a funny pose (see the sprite in the bottom). Like the Peter Griffin pose, that caught me off guard. If someone asked me if it's something worth to take out of a game, I'd say it is, I had a good amount of fun and once the gameplay loop hits, it becomes addicting in a way.

What bummed me were the bosses: the game's difficulty comes from enemy placement during the side scrolling sections, but then the bosses have each a pattern easy to avoid and to exploit. Add the single continue, after which it's game over, you can see why this game is reviled. Me? I find that falling animation funny and the transformations were goofy enough to keep me invested, but if it's worth something I cheered at the golden werewolf, "Just like Super Sonic!" I thought.

Conclusion: I would say Golden Axe is better, but why wouldn't it be? I can see where Team Shinobi and the porting team learned their lessons right here. I think it's worth checking out because it's funny and there shouldn't be any bias when playing games, since there are standards and I understand, but we should all be able to enjoy things nonetheless. I mean come on it's 15 minutes long at least give it a try!

Altered Beast (or Juuouki) is one of those iconic games for the Mega Drive for the better or worst. It was the pack in game for the Genesis here before Sonic made his debut so most owners of the console early on played this game. Nowadays it seems to be disliked a lot but personally of the 4 games in 1988. This is my favorite one.

This is one of those early kind of beat em ups before stuff like Final Fight hit the scene. It's a bit archaic but it's got a nice feel to it when you get things right. Getting the ability to power up feels satisfying and the many animal forms are cool even if their special powers can be quite overpowered.

This is however a very short game and I mean like you can beat it in less than 20 minutes short. The bosses are also really easy outside of the 4th one. So yeah it's not amazing or anything or heck I wouldn't even say it's good but with a friend or even by myself like me because I'm a loser, you can have some fun. It's a shame they never tried making a true sequel to it.

One of the worst games of all time, made even worse by the fact that it can be surprisingly well-regarded as a classic in some circles, and the opposite of your favorite game, in that it rewards repeat playthroughs with more and more awful things you never noticed before. I played it once again this year and this time I noticed that when you get a power up, the animation where the beefcake hero stands still so he can bust his pecs out of his shirt doesn’t freeze the screen and makes him open for an attack

Before Sonic, there was Altered Beast as the Genesis/Mega Drive's pack-in title. Did it do its job? Ehhh...

On one hand, it does a pretty great job at immediately showcasing the system's power, with this looking almost identical to the arcade machine, something very impressive at the time. Sound's not quite as nice, as always, but it's still far better than what the NES could do, and as a whole it does definitely give you the "arcade at home" experience. As a game tho? This is as forgettable as they come.

This game's legacy is just "that one weird buff furry game that came with the Genesis before Sonic did" and for good reason. It's a bland, repetitive beat 'em up with stiff controls that you can beat in an hour as long as you're willing to put up with how boring and simplistic it is. It's not horrible, it's an okay freebie and an alright technical showcase, but it's instantly clear why this was replaced by Sonic just two years later.

im completely satisfied
my other life i will not miss
an altered beast until i die
and i will not give up on this
NEVER!!!

Cleared on March 3rd, 2024 (SEGA Genesis Challenge: 47/160)

Say hello to one of the six launch titles for the Sega Genesis when it was launched in the US. It was the game that came bundled with every Sega Genesis before Sonic took over that position a year later to great success. Altered Beast is an arcade port of a beat-em up where you play as a resurrected human to rescue Zeus daughter from the clutches of Hades, who really wants to welcome you to your doom.

It's pretty much run of the mill as far as side scroller beat-em ups go which isn't surprising since it is launched in 1988, but I liked the idea of transforming into a mighty beast. Upon collecting 3 orbs from the blue hellhounds, you transform into a beast and soon after take on the boss. There's five bosses in the game which are nothing special. The first three bosses are easy enough once you figure out what to do. The fourth boss takes a good amount of hits and avoiding their attack combinations can be difficult under bad circumstances, but then there's the final boss.

Why won't that fucking rhinoceroes die?!