ALTERED BEAST - The Game That Refuses to Die! - Retro Gaming History

hello ladies and gentlemen big daddy top pat here ready to once again discuss some sega history during the 16-bit era of gaming sega would perhaps deliver to us more classics than any other time the sonic games streets of rage trilogy and golden axe series are all prime examples of sega at their best which is why titles from these franchises tend to surface on modern hardware time and time again while some of these games that continue to return remain all-time greats there are others that some would argue are like floating turds that just will not flush away alter beast is a game that many would put in that latter category as no matter what way we paint this picture when it comes to the overall fun factor altered beast is average at best so why is sega so insistent in continuously ramming it down our throat let's find out today ladies and gentlemen we are going to look at all to beast significance some of the underappreciated genius behind the game and why this title clearly is not going to go away from all of our lives anytime soon this is the mad story of altered beast the game that refuses to die yeah today's tau starts off with a gentleman we have talked a lot about on here before makoto uchida the man behind the awesome golden axe series but prior to his involvement with the legendary project like many of us makoto was simply an avid gamer yuchida had a strong affinity for the arcades with a love for pac-man in particular this passion would ultimately lead to him pursuing a career in gaming with his first job role being with sega where he would work as a play tester on the title known as afterburner it would not be long until yuchido would pitch a video game of his own desega with the simple but novel concept of a em up where the lead playable character gets more powerful throughout a gameplay session rather than one where they simply lose health like in a traditional game while the concept was cool sega never felt it was fleshed out enough quite yet so your cheetah would return these play testing job where in his down time he would continue to refine his interesting concept this would eventually result in his concept becoming altered beast which he would begin developing for sega once the project was fully green lit to build on his ideas based around transformations and powering up further influence would be taken from the movie known as howling and amusingly the michael jackson song thriller but obviously inspiration did not stop there further ideas were pulled from movies created by rey harry halsen and an ancient greek setting was chosen for the powerful characters you cheetah had in mind speaking of a conceptual phase you cheeda notes that with video games at the time it was extremely difficult to express the details of the transformation he had in his head but since the game was designed to run on the sega system 16 arcade board the technology offered the function of creating large pictures which would allow you cheetah to represent the character's metamorphosis by building a screen filling transformation scene the purpose of such an art direction for the game was according to makoto to show off flashy visuals that would surprise players reportedly he would get his team to work on transformation sequences for the game for months on end in addition to all of this thanks to the system 16 board this allowed his artists to add great detail to large character sprites plus it would also allow for fantastic visual effects that could provide features such as limbs flying off characters during combat scrutinizing his project uchida was not a fan of some of his team's early sketches so we'd work closely with artists to make his very specific ideas come to life in fact utila was so keen to make his ideas become a reality that the original lead designer for the game would even quit the altered beast team during this whole fiasco eventually altered beast would transform into the title we all know and well are aware of the game would be a single-plane side-scrolling beat-em-up that featured light platforming elements that could even be played up to two players simultaneously which i guess was pretty impressive at the time since cooperative beat em ups were in their infancy with the original double dragon game only seeing release one year before this game back in 1987. the overall premise of alter beast would feature gamers planned as a character who is originally dead but resurrected and empowered by the olympian god zeus to act as his champion this simple concept is illustrated further with the unforgettable sound bite in the game that says rise from your grave the hero's task bestowed upon him by zeus is to rescue the goddess athena from the underworld's evil ruler known as neff who appears at the end of every stage as a boss who takes on different forms and what a beast if you will the game lets players kick punch and jump in combat in action that takes place across five different levels each of which offer a different ancient greek setting across stages gamers must take on an assortment of aggressive undead enemies and maniacal monsters many of which resemble creatures from various aspects of greek mythology defeating certain enemies within this experience players can then obtain spirit ball power-ups that allow the hero their control in to increase his strength and size if three of these magic spheres are successfully collected the hero will transform into a powerful beast these additional form factors include the likes of werewolves bears tigers and even a dragon with each of these transformations housing their own unique abilities for example the werebear has a breath that can petrify opponents and the dragon can fire lightning bolts in terms of stages where each of these magical transformations take place players get to brawl through the acropolis of hades which is a graveyard of sorts a cave functioning as the first steps towards the underworld a further cavern deeply carved into a rock basin a sanctuary that serves as the gates to the underworld palace and finally the underworld itself which means level design wise these stages are a cohesive narrative that features our hero descending deeper and deeper until he reaches his final destination the game would first see release in arcades in the summit of 1988 appearing first in japan under the name of juoki a title i am definitely not going to be pronouncing right but it roughly translates as beast king chronicle when the game was new in arcades it was sure to grab players attentions the game was eye-catching from the get-go offering an attract mode that showed off the full screen transformation a cheetah was so proud of including close-ups of the metamorphosizing hero's eyes regarding this cool feature yuchida has remarked in the past that the scene was about pumping as much energy into five seconds as possible a close-up of the eyes in particular were used as he knew the eyes could be shocking and could instantly grab gamer's attentions the game's loud sound effects paired with the at the time sega 16 boards state-of-the-art graphics would altogether tantalise players into inserting their coins into alter beast's slot allowing gamers to experience this visually impressive affair for themselves as for the gameplay involved in all to beast itself i think many would agree it's pretty average both brawling and platforming are very slow and methodical and it was certainly the cool presentation and transformation gimmick that drew gamers in rather than anything particularly in the actual gameplay department but despite its shortcomings the appeal of alter beast was not enough for sega to not make plenty of money from the game particularly in the united states of america although a commercial success even the game's creator himself makoto yuchida admits that the game has its fair share of shortcomings which partly come down to his own lack of experience in 1988 paired with the other external factors he would have liked to include but could not do so due to time constraints and other issues for example he wanted altered beast cabinets to feature pressure sensitive buttons that could detect the strength of the pressure applied to them implementing such a feature though never came to fruition due to the patent holders of the pressure sensitive technology considering sega's order number to be too small to consider bothering with doing the job for them it is of note that though this technology had been implemented into capcom's 1987 street fighter game with the deluxe cabinets included in this capcom would not bother with it themselves with street fighter 2 due to the buttons wearing out too quickly so in my opinion yuchida and sega had a sort of lucky escape yuchida also has gone on record to comment that the whole development process was very challenging for him stating altered beast was my first game development experience and i didn't know how to create for fun in the gameplay and i struggled a lot i did manage to build some gameplay balance but only with the advice from an experienced lead programmer speaking of the team who worked on the game you cheater had them include some cool easter eggs referencing their previous work for example on shinobi and alex kidd the lost stars but in regards to the overall game shortcomings yuchida once again brings up the pressure sensitive buttons stating because of a lack of pressure sensitive buttons the number of character actions fell to half from the original concept and the complexity of the game was decreased by this as a result players got tired of the game relatively soon in spite of all of these weaknesses though which even the game's creator admits to being there the game was still a coin munching monster of a title both figuratively and literally especially as mentioned earlier in the usa this would mean that when the sega mega drive was released in europe and the same system was released in north america as the genesis the system would come pre-packed with a copy of altered beast with the company banking on the fact that the game's striking transformation animations would replicate the game's arcade success in the homes and that as a result sega mega drive controllers would soon be in consumers oversized western hands youtuber admits that when he first heard that his game would be bundled with a sega genesis he did not know what to expect but thought it was terrific and could not wait to see the results as for this mega drive conversion of the game although still decent looking for its time the more advanced graphical elements are missing from the game such as no more pseudo 3d exploding body parts and the game is now ridiculously hard due to players only being given one credit to complete the game rather than being able to insert more coins many speculate that a high difficulty that would be included within these console games from the period was to stop games from renting these titles from blockbuster video then successfully beating the game in one night so this was a cheap and effective way of enhancing a game's playtime even if it would often result in frustrating results for the end consumers as popular as alta beast was in the arcade the home version that allowed a regular repeat playthrough of the game quickly highlighted the title's lack of depth to the overall game in public and as a result this home conversion of the arcade game never generated the same sort of interest this would overall mean that in the early days of sega's 16-bit console in the west alter beast would not allow the platform to sell like hotcakes like sega had originally wanted in fact all to beast would not even be a system exclusive meaning that you didn't even need to buy an expensive mega drive to play the game anyway as sega would allow the game to be published on just about every freaking gaming platform under the sun away from the mega drive all to beast on other devices would range from average to downright terrible depending on the hardware it was available on and with the development house who was responsible for the conversions for example there are acceptable versions on the pc engine sega master system to even worse versions that were made available across various micro computer formats in an odd piece of history while altered beast was packed in with the genesis to help sega take down the nes in north america weirdly over in japan all to beast was made available to purchase on the nintendo famicom the game is obviously terrible in comparison to what can be found on the mega drive but the conversion developed by azmik did add some new stages and even transformations allowing players to turn into a lion the shark and the phoenix so at the very least a decent amount of effort seems to have been put in to give you an idea though how impressed sega were with the success of altered beast in american arcades sega of japan would even go as far to try and block sega of america from making sonic the hedgehog with packing game in the region the japanese board of directors initially disapproved of the plan but eventually the usa's tom kalinski was green lit by nakayama who stated to him that i hired you to make the decisions for europe and the americas so go ahead and do it now we know the rest is history a sonic the hedgehog that does what altered beast don't the chaotic speed and mass marketing appeal of the blue blur was a cultural phenomenon leaving old ultra beasts in the dust in regards to all of this uchida mentions that he would visit the usa three years after it was announced that alter beast would be bundled with the system in the region he would visit multiple u.s stores but could not find his bundle anywhere only sonic for hedgehog commenting that his biggest regret in his career was never visiting america back in the days where his game was being used to try and sell the genesis despite the game not delivering quite the amount of success sega were after with their genesis hardware i think we can all agree that this game just won't die to this very day the game is still being sold regularly as part of sega compilations for all sorts of different pieces of modern hardware and it appears that it seems to have been the case for many years now one assumes that ultra beast's success in american arcades back in the late 80s paired with the fact that the game was bundled with a 16-bit console in the early days throughout the west this still means that altered beast is too much of a significant part of game and history to allow sega to ignore it and when we take the transformation gimmick into account some of the great artwork and memorable voice samples even if someone picks up altered beast for the first time ever today it is doubtful that they are going to forget the game in a hurry it is still a pretty eye-catching experience ultra beast will never die yeah so ladies and gentlemen i hope you enjoy today's 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Channel: Top Hat Gaming Man

Views: 101,925

Rating: 4.8557873 out of 5

Keywords: altered beast, altered beast history, ALTERED BEAST - The Game That Refuses to Die! - Retro Gaming History, altered beast documentary, sega history, sega documentary, arcade gaming, arcade gaming documentary, sega megadrive, sega megadrive history, sega genesis, sega genesis history, altered beast console, altered beast nintendo, altered beast famicom, altered beast pc engine, altered beast commodore 64, altered beast master system, makoto uchida, makoto uchida sega

Id: HP2Qp2M1jwk

Length: 16min 36sec (996 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 04 2021