Altered Beast
“Rise from your grave!” is perhaps the best part of Altered Beast. A legacy built on voice synthesis? That may just well be the case. The combat is awkward. The challenge manifests itself in a mixture of enemy spam and awkward controls that rely on timing and little else which might not be so bad if the controls were responsive and the game did not move so slowly. The final boss battle deserves a mention as strategy makes a big difference here: a jump and beast-dash combo does the trick nicely—in fact watching yourself go from scrawny muscle man, to bulging steroid-ridden heart attack victim who doesn’t OD on the spot only due to his transformation into man-beast is strangely satisfying, especially because to get the power ups you’ll be kicking technicolour, flashing wolves in the nose (it works on any animal).
But that’s where the (intentional) fun ends. The awkwardness might not be so bad with an arcade stick and a couple of big plastic buttons, but on a PS3 controller things can get cramped, and never feel particularly responsive. The ability to attack upwards (while not crouching on the ground) may have helped matters, but then again perhaps that would have made things too easy, because fending off technicolour mod wolves, pink unicorn men, and bees all at once with but a couple of unresponsive attacks is the sort of challenge that modern games are lacking.
But, while there aren’t really any mod wolves, there are all those other things that I just mentioned, and they come together in an hilarious hodgepodge of pixellated madness that is genuinely amusing to watch being slaughtered. I died often, but I usually did so with a laugh, because it’s hard to be too pissed off when you die from a kick to the groin by a pink unicorn man. Plus, the frustration made the sheer havoc that can be wreaked in beast mode strangely satisfying, despite the fact that I was just mashing square and circle to insta-kill pretty much everything in sight (including the bosses).
Oh, and the whole game only lasts about ten minutes, even if you’re as terrible at it as I was. This is not in any way a bad thing, in fact it’s about as far as the gameplay can last without taking away from the amusement of the fact that you’re turning into a dragon after beating to death a dog on acid. If the game were to last much longer then the lack of depth may just become a little more frustrating; at the one hour mark when you get your steroid-shrivelled testicles gnawed off by a high heeled ram you’d probably be pretty pissed off.
Perhaps my ineptness at the game shows through here and I am missing something much deeper, but the truth is I had no desire to search for what probably isn’t there. One game of online was enough when I discovered that even with minimal lag (which should not have even been there given that I was playing with someone from New Zealand—a state of Australia—just down the ocean from where I live) the already unresponsive controls meant that survival could only be achieved through spamming kick which reaches slightly further than punch.
The sight of two muscle men kicking aimlessly in the direction of bees and snails is not something I will forget soon, though, even if I have no desire to relive such (hilarious) horrors. I experienced it once, and I am a better person for it. Now I can sleep a little better at night knowing that Altered Beast does have some merit as a classic. A classic of the slapstick genre, not beat ‘em up.