Altered Beast CD

~ ALTERED BEAST ~

Sega / NEC Avenue

CD-ROM

1989

Well, this is a shame.

You'd think that a CD rendition of Altered Beast would feature red book music; but as it turns out, the chip tunes perform double duty. And they certainly sound great and all, but it would've been awfully cool to hear AB's compositions treated with vintage PCE CD instrumentation. Sadly, we'll never be granted that opportunity; but NEC Avenue did give us "explosive" sound effects for the occasions where we bust up the odd foreground rock or gravestone. Also, and probably more importantly, this version delivers voices--"Rise from your grave," "Power up," "Welcome to your doom," that sort of stuff--as well as a variety of howls and roars during the beast transformation scenes.

All right, so dreams of red book audio fell by the wayside; next on the "CD version" checklist is cinemas. And yeah, you can select a "STORY" option and sit through a cinematic sequence that relays the Altered Beast tale (voice in Japanese, of course) and displays a bizarre string of images, some of which were lifted from the game's packaging while others were cheap borrowings from the game itself, including exciting things like a close-up title screen portion and an odd boss monster collage. It's weird stuff, and it's all you'll get cinematically; there's no cool new between-stage or ending stuff.

There are some very minor in-game graphical amendments to check out, the most noticeable of which are color swaps in a couple levels. PCE AB's colors are very nice anyway, and while I don't mind the substitutions at all, they don't represent much of a reach on the part of the designers, who might as well have redecorated some more while they were at it.

The adventure itself is less challenging here than it is on card, but don't expect to roll through this if you struggle with the chip version. The gameplay is still rough, but the bosses can't take quite as much of a beating. You can adjust the difficulty to "Hard" if you want to, but the switch didn't make much of a difference to me: some spots contain more (and more-aggressive) enemies, most noticeably later in the game, but this is hardly a big deal if you can reach the end of the journey in the first place.

Speaking simply as a judge of the game itself and disregarding all other circumstances, I like CD Altered Beast a lot. After all, it's a heck of a lot like the HuCard, which I loved in the first place. But I must say it seems like a pretty pointless effort. Why no red book music? Why not more visual changes, more cinemas? This could've, should've, been a very cool and worthwhile project instead of an endeavor now almost universally mocked.