In each level, three Spirit Balls are required to trigger your transformation from recently revived zombie to superpowered mutant-beast. Bad fur day: Altered Beast's first big boss is the gnarly, aggro Aggar who seemingly has an unlimited supply of spare heads to chuck at you.Д¬osmetic issues aside, the real issue at the tangled heart of Altered Beast is the frustrating gap between its promise to the player of becoming a wild, uncaged were-monster and the rather more fractious process of achieving it. These flourishes ended up being just a little cruder when it came to the stepped-down cart. And as your Centurion levelled up by absorbing Spirit Balls - the game's essential currency of transmogrification - his punches and kicks generated Last Airbender-style swooshes that were subtly animated to suggest shockwaves of power. In the arcade, battering a baddie caused them to burst into bloody chunks that seemed to explode out of the screen in pseudo-3D. As well as the crackly speech ('Welcome to your doom!' was Neff's rival catchphrase) there were other technical curlicues. The original 1988 arcade machine, conceived as a rival to Double Dragon, disguised its rather stodgy gameplay with some CPU razzle-dazzle. That version of Altered Beast - the cartridge bundled in with consoles, the one now available for smartphones and tablets - was always going to start off slightly on the back paw. But yeah, can you believe we used to play that? A necessary stepping stone to get to the good stuff. Really? Again? (It probably didn't help that Altered Beast has been available for iOS since 2010.) This furry perennial was the packed-in game for the first Genesis and Mega Drive bundles to ship worldwide and that long familiarity seems to have fostered a very particular strain of bland contempt. When Sega rolled out Sega Forever, the new umbrella for their existing and future plans to consolidate a hefty back catalogue of classic games for iOS and Android, the inclusion of Altered Beast in the launch line-up was met with either eye-rolling indifference or darkly muttered mentions of silver bullets. But despite his powers of resurrection and prophecy, not even Zeus could have predicted the dogged afterlife of Altered Beast, a lycan game that no-one seems to love. The fact that mighty Zeus prefers to delegate the task of rescuing his beloved daughter from the evil sorcerer Neff suggests the randy old goat might know more about the perils of the situation than he is letting on. 'Rise from your grave!' he intones, and with that scratchy incantation of digitised speech, he reanimates a brave, nameless Centurion and throws him into a precarious mission that kicks off immediately with a bloody and slightly disrespectful brawl in a graveyard. Pausing a game produces a nice effect where the screen shrinks down to be a screenshot in the menu.Every game of Altered Beast - Sega's timeworn, arcade-born bash-em-up of Greek gods and weird monsters - is preceded by a command from Zeus.

Altered Beast is presented the same way other titles in the Collection are: in 4:3 with wallpaper borders.

Achievement hunters should note: this game, like most of SEGA's Vintage Collection, features some incredibly easy achievements. You can also now save your game at any moment and return to it later. A friend can join you for co-op play both locally and online. It was meant to be a quarter-munching arcade game and just doesn't work very well at home вЂ“ especially not 27 years after its inception. Sure, you can always continue right from where you perished. He's a stiff, inelegant brute who has trouble making contact with an enemy standing right in from of him. It's all very silly and would be good campy fun if it weren't so awkward. Collect three and the warrior will transform into one of four different forms, such as a werewolf or weredragon. Every so often a flashing wolf will show up and release a spirit ball вЂ“ basically instant steroids that cause your muscles to enlarge until you've busted through your clothing. All he has are his mitts and his feet to fend off skeletons, griffons, and wolves. This is a side-scrolling brawler set in ancient Greece starring a warrior who was happily resting in the afterlife until he is dug up and sent to rescue some chick.

Altered beast