I don’t care what anyone says, Altered Beast was all sorts of awesome. I remember sneaking away from my grandmother’s place all the time because there was an Altered Beast machine at the corner store up the road. Oh and her going mental at me because I “broke” her TV by plugging a Master System into it one day.
Altered Beast > Grandmothers.
Anyway, I played the crap out of it in the arcade, and then it came out as a launch title on the MegaDrive. It was pretty damn good. I bought a MegaDrive just for that game because it had HUGE SPRITES and the guy went “GAAAAAAH!” when he transformed into a bear that shot fireballs.
Oh, almost forgot: before I bought my MegaDrive I got Altered Beast for the Master System. It was utter pants. No two player mode, the enemies moved around jerkily (I think they were character sprites?) and no “GAAAAAAH!” moment.
The Commodore 64 version was broken too.
Wow, I bought lots of copies of Altered Beast.
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The reason for the jerkiness in any 8-bit game with large character graphics is that the lazy design team got around the system limitations by using background tiles instead. ( See also: Golden Axe on the Master System. ) This allowed them to just cut and paste art assets designed for the more powerful systems. Also, it looked great on the back of the box and in advertisements.
Despite this, Altered Beast was great. If only other games allowed you to become so powerful it broke the game, while remaining so short you never become bored of the rush.
Oh yeah, character sprites, the saviour of many otherwise impossible home conversion. I forgot all about that little trick! Space Harrier used it tons too.
The modern Altered Beast was terrible.