Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Old-school"

Altered Beast was the pack-in game for the Genesis in 1989. sold for $189.99. The Genesis version of Altered Beast was a good translation of the System16 arcade game, but nowhere near "arcade perfect", a phrase that I have come to dispise over the years because it's so incredibly overused, and the phrase itself is meaningless. When comparing arcade games to the home versions, if the home version is exactly like the arcade, I like to say "carbon copy". that's the term used in magazines before GameFan came along. I believe it was GameFan magazine that coined the popular but meaningless phrase arcade perfect, lol. Anyway, the Genesis version of Altered Beast had graphics, animation and sound that were very significantly scaled-back, downgraded, cut-down, watered down, (etc) from the arcade version. Genesis Altered Beast simply was not as pretty to look at. The amount of colors on screen are much reduced as is the total color palette Genesis had to choose from compared to the System16 board that powered the arcade game. Genesis could display a max of 64 colors out of a possible 512. The System16 arcade board could display well over 1,000 (possibly 1500 to 2000) colors from a total palette of 32,764. As for sprite pushing power the System16 could move 128 sprites around the screen, the Genesis only 80. Also the 68000 CPU in System16 ran at 10 MHz, the Genesis 68000 was clocked at 7.6 MHz. Another big difference is the System16 had hardware scaling which was effectively used in arcade Altered Beast where the limbs & body parts would fly off and into the screen. in the Genesis version the enemies would just fall apart into balls. The biggest difference though was the fact that the System16 arcade Altered Beast rom was around 15 or 16 meg compared to the 3 or 4 meg Genesis version. All the characters in Genesis Altered Beast are smaller, less defined, less colorful and less animated compared to the arcade. The music was very good however, not exactly like the arcade but reasonably close enough, not a huge downgrade thankfully, and actually the voices sound even cooler, more demonic in the Genesis version. This not thanks to technical power, but changes Sega made when reprogramming the game for home console. As for the gameplay, while the mechanics of the gameplay are the same in Genesis Altered Beast, the difficulty, the pacing and gameplay control are all noticeably different. The Genesis version is MUCH easier and faster paced than the arcade. The arcade game plays slower, with a more "deliberate" feel and is more difficult. The one area in which the Genesis version looks better than the arcade is in that the backgrounds have several layers of parallax scrolling. there was no parallax scrolling in the arcade version -- not because the System16 board could not do parallax, it could, and it could do it better than Genesis, but for whatever reason, Sega's Team Shinobi decided not to implement parallax in the 1988 arcade game. that said, the arcade version still looks much better overall. Altered Beast was a good pack in game for the Genesis. those who want to experience the arcade version should get a copy of Sega Genesis Collection for the PS2 (not the PSP), because it contains both the Genesis and original System16 arcade versions of Altered Beast, a great way to compare the two versions for yourself.