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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. '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. 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. 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.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. 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. It was fine, for the time. A necessary stepping stone to get to the good stuff. But yeah, can you believe we used to play that?
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. The original 1988 arcade machine, conceived as a rival to Double Dragon, disguised its rather stodgy gameplay with some CPU razzle-dazzle. As well as the crackly speech ('Welcome to your doom!' was Neff's rival catchphrase) there were other technical curlicues. In the arcade, battering a baddie caused them to burst into bloody chunks that seemed to explode out of the screen in pseudo-3D. 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. These flourishes ended up being just a little cruder when it came to the stepped-down cart.
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