Altered Beast Longplay (Arcade) [60 FPS]

Developed and published by Sega in 1988.
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Hera, the daughter of Zeus, has been kidnapped by the evil demonic overlord, Neff, who has spirited her away to the Underworld. Seemingly unable to rescue his daughter personally, Zeus resurrects a fallen soldier to seek out and rescue Hera.
Initially armed with nothing more than swift punch and a kick to the shins, the hero must collect spirit balls from the corpses of defeated Cerberan animals before facing a showdown with Neff himself. Each spirit ball increases the physical prowess of the hero, upgrading both speed and combat ability. The third spirit ball will result in transformation to a bestial form, which is bestowed with even more powerful attacks and ranged abilities. Each of the game's levels sees the hero transform into a different mythical beast, including a bipedal wolf, bear and tiger.
At the end of each level, the hero encounters Neff who will himself transform into a hideous, demonic form. Should the hero prevail in this fight, Neff will flee to the next level of Hell, but not before capturing the spirit balls currently carried by the player, thus returning him to human form. Thus the cycle repeats throughout each stage of the game until the end.
Although the game was generally well received, it was never my favourite Sega game. Each stage is relatively short and the combat isn't particularly exciting. Whilst the beast forms are a cool idea, some of them look quite ridiculous, especially the bear, which looks like it's about to start dancing and has an attack that makes it look like it's blowing bubble-gum.
I'm not sure if it's intentional, but the increasing muscularity of the player's human form is rather silly too. The man's body ripples with muscles like sacks of melons and he grows in height, yet his head stays exactly the same size. The resultant effect is that looks like someone has placed a pea on top of a drum.
Having been rescued, the game ends with a closing cut-scene that
suggests that Hera seems to have a thing for furries as she looks up to our hero, still walking around in all his wolfy glory. The final scene shows her old man quite fancies getting a piece of the action as he lurks in the background. That's my interpretation of events at least.
The graphics are reasonable, but nothing special. There's evidence of some nice sprite scaling effects, particularly when Neff transforms into his demon form with clouds of billowing smoke, but little else.
The audio includes digitised speech samples, notably Zeus's famous commandment to "Rise from your grave!" and Neff's taunt, "Welcome to your doom!", which is a nice touch.
The game would be converted to the Mega Drive console, becoming the game system's pack-in game for a time before Sega released Sonic the Hedgehog. The game would also get ported to many other home computers, including the C64; I owned a copy of the game but I remember little about that version, so I'll be sure to check it out and review it at some point.
Even though I'm not personally a big fan of the game, it's still regarded as a classic and I'm sure there of plenty of viewers out there that do like the game. It's certainly not a bad game at all, but I just feel that Sega's best games were yet to come.
#retrogaming

[@sasamisa1806]

That's Athena by the way (Hera is Zeus' wife - I take it you're not a 'Hercules: The Legendary Journeys' fan?).
I actually used to own the original arcade PCB of this game, paid £50 for it I think. Finished it on every difficulty level, although I never did get the maximum 600,000 points on Hardest, which requires a 100% kill rate. (*_*)

[@StarryDynamo88]

Rise from your grave!!!!!

[@ogsouptrooper5426]

This game scared the sht outta me when i was young

[@demarcotolson3763]

Classic but too short

[@reubenguttenberg7405]

From bally midway

[@samuelcarrasquillo4590]

Sega, Not Bally Midway.

[@G.Faustini]

Jogo feio da porra.