Format: Cartridge
Genre: Action platformer
Developer: Sega
Publisher: Sega

Altered Beast is a wonderful example of how to scale down a title for use on a technologically inferior platform. The development team selected logical areas from the clean looking arcade version in which to reduce the on-screen color palette, and many of the re-drawn sprites are aesthetically more pleasing than their technically superior arcade counterparts.

This title came out in the midst of the 8-bit era, where many Atari 7800 and NES games only had one or two songs. As such, Altered Beast only has five tunes, two of which are reused across two stages. The lack of aural quantity is made up for in quality however, with wonderful baroque-like instrumentation and the clearest sounding voice acting heard on a home console to that point in history.

On the surface Altered Beast is an Era 2-leaning action platformer, in the vein of the Shinobi series. But once its very short playthrough length is achieved, the game starts over after the credits, carrying the score and number of lives from the previous playthrough in, but with increased difficulty. The level design is simplistic, but enemy placements are very deliberate, and work well in both the single and two-player modes.

Altered Beast's ancient Greek setting, chilling and catchy music, solid art direction, and clever emphasis on Era 1-style high score competition while still utilizing an overall formula fitting in with the expectations of action gamers of the time, made for a title that gave customers a nice taste of what the then brand new Sega Genesis was capable of. It's no wonder then that Sega chose this title as the system's pack-in game.