Altered Beast is a short arcade-style 2D Action game. Or you can call it one-plane beat-em-up. Supports for up to two players coop. It was first developed for Arcades in 1988 by Sega of Japan's arcade division, Team Shinobi, also known as Sega AM1 later on. Who also got misspelled as "Team Sinobi" in credits of this port, ha! Then around 1989 it got ported by Sega of Japan on Sega Mega Drive, being fitted into 4 Megabit cartridge. Sega used to call those megabits as MEGA POWER. Also, it's bits, not bytes.
It became a pack-in title for console in most western regions, before Sonic took over as pack-in app. So most wouldn't complain about how short it was.
Also it got ported to various consoles as well, like Sega Master System, Turbo-Graphx 16, CD one and NES. Yes, some Sega titles were on those consoles, as unbelivable as it is. Most of them are inferior in various ways, though NES port had original levels, too bad that core gameplay sucked there. Arcade still is the best.
The game that you have here is nothing more than emulation of Sega Genesis version.
Now, technical part about Sega's emulation here:
The Sega Classic games that you purchase on Steam count as DLCs for "Sega Mega Drive & Genesis Classics" game that should appear in your library.
It has Bedroom HUB which is the one with many features yet lags for many and Simply Launcher which lacks Workshop and Online but at least it works just fine for everybody.
However, Simple Launcher has it's fair share of glitches as well. It can crash. And it does the second time you go to main menu, so always quit after saving there so it doesn't crash when you want to save next time!
Emulation itself, mostly sound, isn't that good but it does it's job. Also, yes, emulator supports quick saves.
As alternative, you can use external emulator to run games that you purchased. Sega kindly placed in all games that you purchased in "uncompressed ROMs" folder that program itself doesn't use, just change file extension to ".bin" or so. The file for this one being "ALTEREDB_UE.68K".
I also demand you to read digital manual of this game first. You can find it here on store page or go to "manuals" folder of game root and open "AB_PC_MG_EFIGS_US.pdf".
Has online (in Bedroom HUB only) and local multiplayer.
You play as a "brave and awesome" Roman Centurion, 'Wisen Fwom Yo Gwave' by Zeus to rescue his daughter, Athena, from the sweaty arms of Neff, the god of underworld. So you are off to beat the 5 short stages. It actually has quite an interesting sorta-Japanese take on ancient Greece style, where beasts and demons clearly didn't come from the mythology but rather developers own creations who still kinda fit in style. Each stage introduced new monsters and boss, so it's quite fancy to see all the weirdness.
By the way, talking of 'Wise Fwom Yo Gwave', which is a voice of Zeus that plays at beggining of a game. In reality, Sega Genesis's chip could handle sample playback just fine. "It sucks" is just a myth, guys. Samples are the pre-recorded sounds, which means that it's instruction containing info on vibration on each "step", speaking in my uneducated understanding. They are often used for drums and voices. And yes, even NES could have high-quality music with samples. The big problem is that they take huge space on ROM. The better quality the more space it requires and more ROM means higher manufraction cost. Thus it often didn't have good quality. SNES would get away with forced filtering on sound chip output, so lower quality samples could be used without it sounding scratchy.
Now, what can I say about the gameplay. It's a usual 2D action game, where the screen will slowly scroll while you are taking out the spawning enemies. You have punches and kicks, and unlike many early one-plane beat-em-ups each has it's use, with different collisions. All of them are useful in each situations. It's amazing how I seen some people thinking that kicking up while crouched is useless, it's good against flying monsters and the dogs jumping from above. And level design has enough verticality in gameplay, with various platforms, which puts it over the many early one-plane beat-em-ups.
Even more, you was given the power to transform into the beast from powerups that white two-headed wolves drop upon death in order to save Athena. They often travel in pack with brown wolves, so you can usually predict when albino one is about to pop-up. After death they drop a flying power ball that you have to catch to level up in strenght. The first two times they work like steroids, turning into into macho. And the third one you will turn into furry that is unique to each stage, aside from the last one, having powerful attacks, wrecking stage until you meet Neff, who will transform into boss only if you have anthro shape. Though in Genesis version he will always become a boss the third time you meet him, instead of looping stage. Too bad that three out of five bosses have cheap tactics to beat.
Overall, yea, it's arcade experience in a sense that you have game over and have to start again if you lose all lives. By default you have same amount of lives as if you put a single coin into arcade. But the object layout for each stage of Genesis got changed a bit to be easier on default difficulty. Seeing how they don't have any rock object to break, level 2 sure feels too flat. Not to mentioning that it annoyes me the strange lack of background graphic on top of screen there. But yes, since it's short, it's not hard to memorize and learn to beat stages easily after a while. Not to mentioning that three out of five bosses have easy cheap tactics.
And then you can continue after game over by pressing A+Start at title screen. B+Start at it brings options menu, where you can change difficulty and health, lives count. Actually, if you beat game, it sends you back to beggining with difficulty increased. Difficulty increase just changes layout of placement of enemies and makes some bosses throw more projectiles, so it's actually cool and not lame. Also, it has cheat (as in not in manual) menus for sound test and menu where you can select beast form for each stage. Cool.
Music is also still enjoyable. While arcade credits sequence where it turns out that it was all the movie, telling it through still images, was cut, it still has awesome credits song.
While game was ported to Genesis, it surely took hit in graphics, quality and animations. However, they decided to add parallax to most levels.
What is parallax? It's when background is separated into different layers that move at different speed, giving it the feeling of depth. It was called as 3D effect in early 90s.
And while SNES's main attraction was Mode 7, aka rotating around a single background layer, Sega Genesis was all about Parallax abuse with ten layers or so. So pay attention to those for fun.
It also has multiplayer if second player presses start at title screen. It's same as usual, no friendly fire or anything special, just two Centurions on steroids. The only difference is that albino wolves throw two spirit balls. And yep, one can take them both.
But yea, it's short and wouldn't last much more than hour of mastering (or 10 minutes of beating once you get it down), but still enjoyable arcade one-plane beat-em-up game, with leveling quickly on each stage varying it up. And it was pack-in, so oh well.
