"Won for your wife!"

Video games have taught me to deal with all sorts of hypothetical situations that have yet to happen. If I ever find myself in a street fight, Final Fight has taught me to look for the nearest available weapon. If I ever need to evade the police, Grand Theft Auto III has taught me to change my car’s color and license plates. If I’m ever going to persuade a cute girl to join my volleyball team, Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball has taught me not to buy her a G-string.

The lesson I was taught from this otherwise substandard game is considerably less instinctive and trustworthy: if you need to dispose of the walking dead, the best way to do it is to beef up and kick them in the shins until they explode.

Welcome to the world of Altered Beast.

Upon inserting one’s coin, the almighty Zeus instructs you to awake from your eternal slumber and rescue his daughter from the evil hordes. Despite being dead only moments ago, your character hops to his feet without any trace of rot or rigor mortis, fists clenched and ready for action. Personally, I’d be ready to whoop some ass, too: from the looks of things, it’s obvious that you, the strongest of all warriors, were buried in a magenta tank top and bike shorts. I know that’d piss me the hell off.

Altered Beast seems ingenious in its simplicity: walk to the right, punching and kicking anything in front of you until it dies. Altered Beast takes place on a single plane, with your poorly dressed character using high punch attacks and low kick attacks to pacify any manner of freak that gets in front of him. Enemies will come from both land and air to take you out, and it’s up to you to brawl with these ghastly oddballs if you want to do any sort of rescuing.

If a slow-moving and nauseatingly colored zombie springs up from the earth, your hero is more than adept at standing in front of it and swinging until it bursts into a small eruption of rotting meat and assorted bones. Its pitiful shuffling isn’t much of a threat. If a winged goblin descends from the sky to try and annoy you slightly, you can easily jump 30 feet in the air to sock it in the head. If a small, bulbous reptile hobbles onscreen to annoy you, your character excels at weakly kicking it in the ribs until it pops. It’s not particularly fun or good looking, but it’s something to do.

The problem is that certain enemies defy your abilities outright, or become unmanageable in groups of two or more. Take the beefier ghouls: these horned wankers will walk onscreen, often going right through a punch without taking any damage, and will start punching at you repeatedly. It’s not a pretty sight, either in animation (it’s just one punch, somewhat comical in its repetition) or in result (you end up eating about 5 of them before you can react). Flash forward a few levels, and you’ll meet some unusual hybrid of a bee and a chicken: it runs straight at you with stinger exposed. Sure, you can hit one and cause it to submit with an unsatisfying burst, but the next one will probably run right into you while your arm is retracting and bowl you over. Expect your muscle-bound disappointment to reel backwards, screaming in pain. Often. Although the game’s digitized speech will tell your lifeless corpse to “NEVER GIVE UP!” you’ll undoubtedly want to.

By far the most trying of the Altered Beast experience, however, are the three-headed dogs, easily the most difficult enemies in the game. These creatures come barreling into view like a bat out of hell, trampling over you in about half of a second. In order to best the dog, success requires that it needs to be standing still, the screen clear from other enemies, and your strongman in a position to attack it: any failure of these conditions will cause you to reel backwards in pain when the snarling animal charges headfirst.

Here’s the clincher: you need to kill these things for a respite from the constant assaults on all sides from the other enemies. When you clobber a white dog, a small orb is spit out. These orbs allow you to turn into the…

ALTERED BEAST

Well, theoretically.

First, they’ll beef you up. The first orb will give you a ripped shirt, a’la Fabio romance novel cover. Your basic punching and kicking remain more or less effective, although they do somewhat more damage now. Yet another orb rips the remainder of your shirt to tatters, enlarging your pecs and thighs to giggle-inducing proportions. Although now you’re left with a physique that’s a dead ringer for Arnold Schwarzeneggar when he’s wearing that red Speedo in Commando (I deny owning it), your head remains at the same size it was before your ‘roid overdose, and your punching and kicking is given only a moderate increase.

You’re still limited to kicking people in the shins, but now you can kick them in the shins really hard, leaving behind an ethereal motion blur. The powers of the Altered Beast are only an orb away, whence you’ll be able to shoot fire, emit lightning, or turn people into stone! It is here that the game becomes briefly playable, as you can maneuver a dragon to shock two monsters at once, or use your were-tiger to nail an enemy as you jump off of the ground with a fiery aura, and another on the way down. You can fly across the screen with a blazing jump-kick as a werewolf, or curl into a tight furball and maul people as a massive grizzly bear.

This is also the only way to fight bosses, as your confrontation with the head goon of the level begins shortly after you pick up your last orb. The bald-headed stage boss will accept your challenge, and morph into a ghastly beast—you aren’t the only transformer in this town. The first boss is quite the looker: a powerhouse of a muscled demon that throws severed heads to clobber you. The fourth boss really requires the abilities of the were-tiger to be used in full effect, as you duck under fireballs, kick the underside of the floating dragon, and jump over low-trajectory shots.

These segments seem exceedingly few, however.

About 80% of the game consists of steering around your rugged strongman. At best, he is a clumsy solution to the zombie problem rather than a precision instrument for fixing it. You won’t be shooting lightning or using blazing kicks—you’ll be knocked on your ass as you try to destroy enemies with lethargic punches and kicks, glowing or not. Should you miss an orb dog, you get to watch it leap past you, with your orb, knowing full well that you’ll have to wade through the level that much longer. It’s very disconcerting to watch your only salvation from the wearisome regular game literally gallop off the screen.

It’s equally unfortunate that the precious few stretches of the game where one controls an Altered Beast are playable, but nothing more. Your beast can tear through people like a .357 can tear through a sno-cone, but the boss battles lack panache. Once you’ve figured out the single way to defeat them, it’s unlikely there will be any surprises or drama from that point forward. Worse yet, once you’ve killed them, it’s back to controlling your little man around for the majority of the next level.

Altered Beast is kitschy, but it’s not kitschy enough to forget about how irritating it is. Though it’s comical to see your character swell up to Herculean proportions upon collecting that second orb, it’s less comical when an enemy waltzes past your punch, hits you in the face 3 times, and knocks you over into another enemy—who in turn knocks you over as soon as you get up.

Though some say that the human segments of the game make the player yearn for the increased power and control of the Altered Beast, all it made me yearn for was a better game to play in the meanwhile. The segments where one controls the Altered Beast, if anything, belie the boredom and frustration that constitutes the bulk of the game. Past the voice acting, the transforming, and the shin kicks, Altered Beast is much like your character’s massive man-breasts: hard and stiff.

3 / 10

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 06/08/03, Updated 06/08/03