Welcome to your doom!

August 23, 2009 3:56 AM

Wise fwom your gwave!It's difficult to forget the tale of a warrior recalled from death by the gods to rescue Zeus's daughter from Neff the evil wizard by kicking demon dogs to death and climbing the muscular ranks to finally become a mighty fireball-hurling werewolf or an electric dragon.
posted by Servo5678 (41 comments total)

WELCOME TO YOUR DOOM
posted by fire&wings at 4:05 AM on August 23

That game had a story?
posted by oddman at 4:22 AM on August 23 [2 favorites]

*Pre-empts thread
*Submits Strider-related FPP

Woo-Hoo! Infinite lives!
posted by Smart Dalek at 4:22 AM on August 23 [2 favorites]

Picture, if you will, the year 1989. Us kids had ours Nintendo Entertainment Systems (or, in my case,a Sega Master System) but those things paled compared to the arcades, which featured huge characters, more colorful graphics, and, in our minds, were simply legions better than anything we could get at home. Then, that Fall, Sega unleashed the Genesis to the stores, packaged along with the popular arcade game Altered Beast.

This is one of the biggest differences in memories of games like this when I talk with people about games from around this time. To be more precise Altered Beast and Double Dragon were cool games when they came out in the arcade, but some people strictly have memories of these games on the consoles. Their memories tend to be more pixelated.
posted by P.o.B. at 4:52 AM on August 23

That first link gets it right. Altered Beast really wasn't a very good game. There's nothing all that groundbreaking about it, and if they ever start teaching History of Video Games 101 (as if), they could skip right over this thing. It was mostly sizzle, not much steak.

That said, the sizzle on this thing was incredible for the time, and the first hour or two you spent with it were intense fun, based purely on the graphics. I'd venture that any gamer that was active when this game came out remembers it, and probably liked it.

I think Altered Beast may be in the unique position of being the least interesting game that's widely remembered, which in and of itself makes it kind of interesting. When you look at those screenshots, remember that, for the time, it was stunningly beautiful. There was a real sense of excitement in being able to control a game with graphics that good. It was intrinsically fun just because the visuals were so amazing.

Without that sense of graphic splendor, the game itself falls on its face. Blech.
posted by Malor at 5:00 AM on August 23 [3 favorites]

I remember this game vividly because a) it was awesome a b) my friend had the Adlib sound card and we had a heck of a time getting it to work but once we did it was intense
posted by evilelvis at 5:23 AM on August 23

This is the game I remember playing on the Packard Bells at Circuit City when my best friend and I would hang out there on Sunday afternoons. It had one of those "consult the manual" copy protection schemes so we could never get past the first level, but damn if "rise from your grave" and the wolf-man transformation weren't the coolest things ever.
posted by zhwj at 5:30 AM on August 23

The first link, and Malor, were correct: this was an awful, clunky game, but a midblowing tour-de-force before you realised this.

It was the first game where the power-ups had a really significant impact on the character you played, and this, coupled with the huge graphics and samples, compelled you to try to better your last game. At the same time, certainly on the Megadrive/Genesis versions, those huge graphics and clunky controls made it difficults to move around and not die for doing so. Most of the screen felt blocked due to the huge graphics, all jostling for space on a two dimensional plane.

The backstory was astoundingly random. Very nice to find the ending a send-up of the rest of the game, I could never play past the first two levels, even with the innovative 'credit' limit the Megadrive offered.

Flashbacks to Tib St. arcades in Manchester as a kid. Those arcades are long gone, replaced with bars and design agencies. Meh.

Thanks Servo5678!
posted by davemee at 5:38 AM on August 23

*Submits Strider-related FPP

I could beat Strider with my first guy. Memorized the crap out of that game during college.
posted by schoolgirl report at 6:42 AM on August 23

Ah, Altered Beast. One of my all-time favorites. It makes me smile whenever I think of it, and I'll still fire up MAME from time to time just to get a taste of that old, clunky, stupid glory.

The less said about Project Altered Beast, the better.
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:56 AM on August 23

I always enjoyed Altered Beast, but I first played it in the arcade. The fact that it came packed in with the Genesis sealed the deal for my brother and me.

By the way, it wasn't just the graphics that made the game. It's the fact that you turned into a FUCKING BEAR with paralysis-inducing breath. That was the coolest thing ever (outside of Splatterhouse and the sit down versions of Sega games) for a ten year old in the arcades.
posted by Dr-Baa at 7:18 AM on August 23

*Pre-empts thread
*Submits Strider-related FPP

Woo-Hoo! Infinite lives!

Oh man, it took a second reading for me to catch what you were getting at. Well played.
posted by Dr-Baa at 7:21 AM on August 23

For some strange reason, when I was a kid, I would always read the name as "Alter-red Beast". Anyway, back then it was just the most awesome game evar!

Of course my only other game that I had for the Genesis was Last Battle. Which also had impressive graphics, but the gameplay was even worse than Altered Beast. I'm not sure if I ever beat that game, but I do remember you powered up by shredding your shirt just by flexing really hard.
posted by Talanvor at 8:03 AM on August 23

That thing Malor speaks about, where a game turns out to be more important than it is good, is pretty common in video games, and usually linked to technological advancements. Early-'90s CD-ROM FMV games are a great example--that stuff seemed amazing at the time, and now it seems unplayable.

Remember Stunt Race FX for the SNES, or Hard Drivin' for anything? Groundbreaking graphics, horrible gameplay, and they've aged very badly.

It's not unheard-of in other media, either, as a lot of people who bought The Matrix as one of their first DVDs will attest.
posted by box at 8:30 AM on August 23

Oh, and Alex Kidd, that was my Genesis jam. Jan-ken-pon!
posted by box at 8:30 AM on August 23

Aw, not Shadow of the Beast?
posted by anthill at 8:39 AM on August 23

Last time I was in the Plaza Theater in Atlanta they had an Altered Beast arcade machine. I played it. It was just as hard as I remembered it being when I was 12. Thing was designed to eat quarters.
posted by dortmunder at 8:50 AM on August 23

Of course my only other game that I had for the Genesis was Last Battle.

Interesting factoid: Last Battle was a Fist of the North Star game stripped of its license for the Western market.
posted by Dr-Baa at 8:57 AM on August 23 [1 favorite]

Aw, not Shadow of the Beast?

That's a series that deserves its own FPP. Especially considering the series bizarre evolution of main characters from fantasy creature to Conan-lite to son of Indiana Jones Jr.
posted by Dr-Baa at 9:09 AM on August 23

And here I thought we were going to talk about Phuture's massive 1992 release rise from your grave.
posted by cloax at 10:11 AM on August 23 [1 favorite]

>Aw, not Shadow of the Beast?

Wow. The intro music and graphics still make my spine tingle. That game was mindblowing at the time. Psygnosis was legendary—their games were like others.

Tried to play it again a while ago, and I was amazed by how difficult it was.
posted by ixohoxi at 11:32 AM on August 23

the music from strider was amazing. hell the game was amazing. robotic gorilla? politburo snake man? purple pirate? I GOT YA.

i wholly and ironically love that game. played it endlessly on my genesis.
posted by jcruelty at 11:50 AM on August 23

sorry s/ironically/UNIRONICALLY. i unironically love that game.
posted by jcruelty at 11:51 AM on August 23

and yeah , shadow of the beast was a shitty game but will always love the music & the parallax scrolling
posted by jcruelty at 11:52 AM on August 23

Did someone say Altered Beast?
posted by Rangeboy at 12:38 PM on August 23

Wow, thanks for this nostalgia time. This brings back memories of hunting for arcades with Altered Beast and Golden Axe machines in my youth. It was an afternoon and a few dollars wasted, but you felt like a king for the rest of the day.
posted by Avelwood at 1:09 PM on August 23

that stuff seemed amazing at the time, and now it seems unplayable

It always seemed unplayable to me. The FMV thing was a gimmick, and the way it worked in gaming was not well conceived. They attracted some attention, but they never caught on with most gamers, and pretty soon the novelty wore off when better designed games proved more attractive in the market than movie-realism.
posted by krinklyfig at 2:22 PM on August 23

That thing Malor speaks about, where a game turns out to be more important than it is good, is pretty common in video games, and usually linked to technological advancements. Early-'90s CD-ROM FMV games are a great example

To expand on what I said, I think it's more interesting to look at the games which are breakout successes despite the lack of bleeding-edge technology and/or big marketing/money behind it, the sleeper games. Like Tetris, Atari Adventure, Zork, Katamari Damacy, Portal, and definitely there is a big push for that sort of thing with the new independent game market, especially with games like Darwinia and World of Goo.

As to what you're talking about, I remember when Pac Man was released for the Atari 2600. It was important, but it was not good.
posted by krinklyfig at 2:49 PM on August 23 [1 favorite]

This is the default game on my MAME cabinet!
posted by sourwookie at 3:17 PM on August 23

but some people strictly have memories of these games on the consoles.

I find it even a bigger divide that so much of the US landscape appears to have been consoles at all. When I were a lad it was all personal computers - consoles didn't become big for the UK/Australian/NZ gaming scene until the likes of the Playstation.
posted by rodgerd at 4:29 PM on August 23

Shadow of the Beast, I think, occupied the same place in my Amiga-owning youth that Altered Beast did in that of people whose first 16-bit machine was a Genesis. When I first saw it, running a friend's pirated copy, my jaw dropped. So many colors. So much motion. Right there on a card table in my parents' living room. Finally it was clear how much power I had in this computer; this sucker looked damn near as good as an arcade game.

A few years later, I realized what a shitty, tedious game it actually was.

But I still have the t-shirt that came with the game. And the one that came with Beast II. And sometimes, when I pick up a key, I still say "A KEY! Find the DOOR it opens."

And now I'm doing a comic book whose world owes a lot to the work of Roger Dean. Who I got into because of... the cover paintings he did for Psygnosis' games. Funny how things enter your life.
posted by egypturnash at 5:15 PM on August 23 [1 favorite]

This thread needs more Golden Axe!

I only played the first two games, but from what I hear that's probably a good thing...
posted by Yoshi Ayarane at 5:15 PM on August 23

consoles didn't become big for the UK/Australian/NZ gaming scene until the likes of the Playstation.

Not in the Australia I lived in! Just about everyone I knew had either a Sega Megadrive (Genesis) or an SNES. The console was often in addition to an Amiga 500 or Atari ST.
posted by Diag at 6:01 PM on August 23

Altered Beast's graphics were much better in the arcade mostly because of its copious use of scaling effects. All of those things that smoothly zoomed up or down in size in the arcade just sat there on the Genesis. If the Genesis had hardware scaling on par of the Sega-at-the-time's arcade hardware, it's possible the 16-bit wars would have turned out quite differently.

Alas as it was, considering hardware alone, over the SNES the base Genesis has a much faster processor and that's about it.

box: "Remember Stunt Race FX for the SNES, or Hard Drivin' for anything? Groundbreaking graphics, horrible gameplay, and they've aged very badly. "

Actually, I still like to play Hard Drivin' a little. It helps that the game is fairly chalenging. The Phantom Photon mode was a great idea for the time. Unfortunately the version in Midway Arcade Treasures 2 has emulation problems that cause the car to frequently tumbles through the world geometry.

Atari did so much to further the cause of polygons and 3D that it's surprising they aren't generally remembered for it now.

jcruelty: "the music from strider was amazing. hell the game was amazing. robotic gorilla? politburo snake man? purple pirate? I GOT YA.

i wholly and ironically love that game. played it endlessly on my genesis."

It was strange, I'll give you that. It's extraordinarily imaginative. The Russian parliament melding together in a huge hammer-and-sickle-wielding snake robot?! That's like Kirby territory right there. (Jack Kirby.)

The game itself shows a lot of ingenuity in giving the player many options for moving around. And yet... a lot of its difficulty comes only as the result of the incredibly cramped screen. Hiryu's blade looks badass when it extends so far across the screen (and that's before powerup), and yet, it's so huge only because everything is so dang large that you can't see hardly anything around him. It's a game that would be a lot more fun if the camera were pulled a bit farther back, but if you did that the graphics wouldn't seem as cool, and you'd also see how small the game really is. There's only like five levels, and none of them are that large really.

Genesis Strider is another game that was considered arcade perfect at the time, yet when played alongside the arcade version seems obviously lacking in comparison.

krinklyfig: "To expand on what I said, I think it's more interesting to look at the games which are breakout successes despite the lack of bleeding-edge technology and/or big marketing/money behind it, the sleeper games. Like Tetris, Atari Adventure, Zork, Katamari Damacy, Portal, and definitely there is a big push for that sort of thing with the new independent game market, especially with games like Darwinia and World of Goo.

As to what you're talking about, I remember when Pac Man was released for the Atari 2600. It was important, but it was not good."

Atari Adventure actually is pretty advanced for its time. And the fact that it's one of the few 2600 games that's still playable now should count for something.

Yoshi Ayarane: "This thread needs more Golden Axe!

I only played the first two games, but from what I hear that's probably a good thing..."

Which second game are you talking about, the so-so Genesis Golden Axe II, or the awesome, yet extremely rare and only emulated recently, arcade Revenge of Death Adder?
posted by JHarris at 7:42 PM on August 23 [3 favorites]

I used to play Hard Drivin' at a huge local amusement center; they had the full sit-down version with the repositionable seat and the force-feedback steering. It was incredibly immersive, and took genuine skill to do well at. The jumps and loops were fairly physically accurate for the time. You'd never mistake it for a modern game, but there was at least some depth to it. Doing 3D at all was really hard back then; in 1989, there just wasn't a whole lot of processor power available. The 80486 had just been introduced, at a mighty 20 megahertz, to give you an idea of the magnitude of the problem.

I suspect it would be harder to like if your first experience omitted force feedback, like playing it via MAME. The local unit's feedback broke several times, and eventually they stopped fixing it. That took a lot of the fun out of it; the feel of the road actually did matter for gameplay, and increased immersion a bunch.
posted by Malor at 8:46 PM on August 23 [1 favorite]

Altered Beast was terrible.

On the bright side, I found this awesome ninja golf flash game while surfing around from the i-mockery link
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 8:56 PM on August 23

Which second game are you talking about, the so-so Genesis Golden Axe II, or the awesome, yet extremely rare and only emulated recently, arcade Revenge of Death Adder?

Thanks, I had never heard of Revenge of the Death Adder before. A quick trip to MAME-land reveals that it is indeed totally awesome.

Back on topic, Altered Beast was pretty boring to play but graphically quite nice and usually the loudest game in the arcade. That made it worth the occasional 20 NZ cents back in the day.
posted by AndrewStephens at 12:22 AM on August 24

To fill in those reading who may not be familiar with Revenge of Death Adder:

Start with Golden Axe. Drop (unfortunately) the heavy Conan/Frazetta influence. Up the character maximum to four. Make one of them a weird pitchfork-wielding elf dude whose magic produces health restoring apples. Make another one a rocking female centaur. Another one is a giant who carries the dwarf from Golden Axe on his shoulders. Make the game much longer, with branching paths, and have it provide a much greater variety of play situation. Throw in a larger variety of ridable creature, and even give them equipment in the form of carryable catapults. Finally, instead of just simple letter grades, make the higher rankings on the score screen "Best in the universe," and go down through "best in the world," "best in the nation," etc.

Mix it all together and bake in the furnace of arcade nostalgia. Serves four.
posted by JHarris at 4:07 AM on August 24

Throw in a larger variety of ridable creature

So you have the dwarf from Golden Axe riding on a giant riding on another creature, which is carrying a catapult. I hope at least some of those ridable creatures are themselves riding on other creatures.

I must play this game.
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 6:57 AM on August 24

i am somewhat obsessed with golden axe - revenge of death adder since hearing about it in this thread. (Well, read obsessed as 'watched playthru on youtube & briefly played it on MAME before giving up') Thanks for the tip jharris! The spectacle of the giant carrying a dwarf riding a scorpion carrying a catapult was definitely good for a few giggles
posted by jcruelty at 3:40 PM on August 29

GA2: Revenge of the Death Adder playthrough
posted by jcruelty at 3:41 PM on August 29