project altered beast
a videogame by sega for playstation 2
a review by tim rogers
1/2

Sega's Project Altered Beast is a miracle of a videogame. At least, it's a miracle on the day that I first play it. I don't know if time will remember it as a miracle. What's so miraculous about it is that it makes me feel this gripping dread, which shakes my core as a human being and makes me say something so darkly fatalistic as "This game is a sin, and none who were involved in or approved of its making will escape the fires of Hell."

Far be it for me to be unjustifiably unfair, though. Let's give some background. Project Altered Beast is a remake of Altered Beast, a game from 1989, a game we played when we were ten years old and all we wanted to do was walk and punch things, so long as our on-screen avatars were huge, grainy, shirtless men whose fists grew flames as they punched, until they'd accumulated so many flames that the screen blacked out and our face roared into a werewolf or a dragon and then the game got way easier. In that game of old, our heroes were risen from their graves at a vaguely Grecian cemetary, by some bearded old man who might have been Zeus. It took us through six stages of white pillars and underground caverns of marble. It ended when we'd paid it enough money.

No amount of money will make Project Altered Beast end, and I wager no amount of money will make it hardly begin, either. Here is a game that makes so many missteps before we've punched one zombie it's hard to imagine it even really has feet. Our hero this time is a man connected to some kind of military, crash-landed at what looks to be the gates to a theme-park haunted house under a Mars sky. Our vehicle is in flames, and our hero is now shirtless by consequence. Devoted fans of the original (that is to say, those who remember the original yet haven't played it since their age busted double digits) will recognize this as a throwback. Others will wonder what's up with the scar on the guy's chest. Has he had a heart transplant recently? Zombies are shuffling toward, so we press the button that, in most other games, makes the hero punch things, and the zombies end up punched. It doesn't feel like we're the one throwing the punches either way. Soon we turn into a werewolf, quadrupling our walking speed and quintupling our attack power. So long as we keep attacking enemies, we keep receiving globs of green goo, which keeps our werewolf murder-meter from depleting to zero.

That's pretty much the whole game. If ever you find yourself turned back into a human, you find yourself cripplingly slow and foolishly weak. Punch a few more zombies, and you earn your werewolf freedom. Now you can bound around, slash-punching hordes of mutants. It's easy. Beat the first boss, if you can figure out where the invisible barrier around him ends and his hit-box begins (it's really quite violent), and you earn a "microchip" that lets you turn into a merman, which controls like a the submarine in the Final Fantasy VII minigame. It's like swimming through a pool of marmalade. You attack with sound waves, which make your enemies explode into pops resembling watermelons hit with sledgehammers. Eventually, you can turn into a grizzly bear, which is so slow and so powerful that it somehow reminds me of the barbarian in Gauntlet, only that bastard was throwing axes. Even at the end of the game, when you earn the flying Dragon power, you'll still prefer the crazy leaping werewolf.

Earn enough "microchips," and you can "upgrade" any of your "altered beasts." This makes the statistics of your monsters represented by marginally larger numbers on the status screen. I otherwise don't see what the point is. It's not like Panzer Dragoon, where you can see your dragon evolving. At the end of the game, your werewolf might be able to kill a giant rat in one hit instead of two; his strength is now two-fold -- does it really matter, though?

I give this game half a star because it is lazy, and because it is bad. More so because it's lazy. It's made without any inspiration. Readers of the insertcredit.com forums optimistically speculated at first that it might be "like an arcade-y Silent Hill"; here I tell them that it is nothing of the sort. It has no tact. The only thing Silent Hill about it is the dark, meandering music that plays in the beginning as you stumble around finding your bearings as a shirtless human being. Eventually you turn into a werewolf and freak out, and then revert back to a human, and there's a girl who tells you you're going to be okay, and then she disappears. There are cut-scenes later, showing your hero being briefed by members of his secret military force; your commanding officer never says anything really interesting. Absolutely no developments will make a player jump up from Indian style on the floor and scream "HOLY SHIT"; you might ask me if that's necessary, and I would answer that, in a game like this, it certainly is. It is a gruesome sin for a game about an average GI Joe who finds himself cursed with the ability to turn into giant monsters under moody lighting to not behold a single detail of its universe with wonder or humor.

Furthermore, and most importantly, is the aspect of aesthetics. I've said before that I've never been able to get into Silent Hill, though damned if those games don't at least look good. Project Altered Beast, with regard to graphics, is a strange . . . beast. The textures and the polygons all flow smoothly; yet the character and monster designs seem as though they were made solely to be unappealing. The werewolf is a giant purple-mohawked, silver-sliver-eyed, shiny-teethed, hunched-over blob of grotesque polygons. The zombies are fat beasts with undefined faces, looking like brushed-up monsters from a Nintendo 64 game. The zombies' faces are especially of note; it's as though the artist sought only to make zombies that looked like no zombies ever in any game that contained zombies. It's a real shame the artist thought this way, because we end up with things that look too unattractive even Fangoria wouldn't bother. They're lazy-looking zombies who don't look like zombies at all. You know what they say about heroes and villains, right? The audience likes a good hero; they love a good villain. This is crucial -- the audience adores a good screaming blonde high-school-girl; the audience salivates over the disgusting monster that seeks to eat her. None of the monsters here are memorable. None of them are interesting. They're all slapped-together filler. This won't do. This game is not, therefore, a horror game. It's just an ugly action game full of ugly things.

The gameplay isn't so beautiful either. Like I might have indicated, you spend your time fluctuating between shirtless burly guy and bounding werewolf. As the shirtless guy, you might sometimes get caught on corners of walls. You might sometimes have to jump six times in a row, standing still, trying to punch a mutant bee that's been following you for ten minutes. You might sometimes have to work three levers in a boat house to release watergates just so you can get back in the damned water and turn into a damned boring merman again. As a werewolf, you are either jagging the attack button while faced with unattractive things or bounding down corridors, turning every corner, never coming to an intersection, never making a choice. It's turn at every corner, punch every monster. Sometimes the corridors open into wide courtyards, and at times like this, you find yourself surrounded by demonic beasts. This is where you kill all of them. Little dodging or jumping is involved, though these are things you can do. Even on the highest difficulty setting, you will never feel challenged in a straight fight; it reminds me of the first Virtual On in a way, only in that game I couldn't tell why I kept losing. In both games I don't feel like I'm really doing anything; though in Project Altered Beast I can directly connect each press of the square button with each swipe of my werewolf's claws, something about the spinning and leaping form of my werewolf just doesn't register in the back of my brain. There is a rift between the player and the game, here.

insertcredit.com's Eric-Jon Waugh said that he had some hope that Project Altered Beast, a "sub-B-movie of a videogame," would have some virtue as such. I reply that it does not have any virtue as pretty much anything. A "sub-B-movie" of a videogame, even a B-movie of a videogame could, yes, be implemented well. I would go so far as to say that some of D3 Publishers' Simple 2000 series games, like The Daibijin, in which the player controls an army mobilized to stop the threat of a fifty-foot-tall swimsuit model as she stomps toward Tokyo, are closer to "B-movie videogames," and not just because they tend to borrow B-movie concepts. I am of the mind that B-movie plots are rather universal, and will pop up in the brainstorming sessions of B-artists whether they be involved in games or movies or television shows or whatever. I'm awaiting a B-videogame about a woman in Hokkaido who murders her husband, and the detective who investigates it. Make it a space shooter.

B-movies and B-videogames (though they don't exist outside D3 Publishers' efforts) are born of men who think too much of themselves spinning out drecky ideas so full of their own essence that certain, strangely-wired individuals can't help falling in love with every minute. Project Altered Beast is one step below this, in that it represents a move from the fading, once-glorious Sega to revive a "franchise" that had only ever consisted of one game, anyway. No one really liked that game, as we'll reiterate. No one. If you say you liked it, it's because you only think you liked it. You merely wanted to see a werewolf half the height of the screen punching monsters, back then. That was all you craved. Keep in mind that such games -- as well as the multi-plane side-scrolling walk-and-punch games -- were born out of single story concepts alone. Golden Axe was made by men who wanted to make a game about medieval knights, elves, and other Dungeons and Dragons-like stuff, yet didn't possess the ingenuity to program an RPG that wasn't boring. Golden Axe and Altered Beast, two videogames that should never be played in their original forms by human beings who have never played them before, were games of a kind of instant-gratification variety, which lured in first-time players at the arcade, who either walked away bored or stayed to see the end because the voices and extreme graphics were enthralling. Project Altered Beast, for PlayStation2, as a game that you have to think hard about, buy, take home, unwrap, load, and then play, isn't worth it. It's too complicated to be an arcade game, and it doesn't even offer any delayed gratification, much less any of the instant variety. It is a sack of loose game parts, not a game. I am shocked to see it scoring sixes and sevens on a scale of one to ten in various British publications. It is not above average. It is nothing. It doesn't care about you. Don't encourage it.

Does this game have any redeeming qualities? It is with something resembling sheepish regret that I say, well, yeah. Six hours, it took me to beat it, and two weeks later, I found myself playing it again. I was playing on the hard level, wandering down a corridor as the shirtless man, with a full monster murder meter. A right turn came up. I rounded it. Then a left turn. Right turn again. Left turn. Stunning dungeon design. A friend who doesn't ever play videogames and is all the prettier for it sat behind me, sipping a cup of tea and remarking on the blandness of the level design. I was on my knees, sitting like in a Japanese tea ceremony. My friend was sitting the same way. I eventually emerged, shambling, like a cowboy, almost, into a courtyard. In a flash of light, the place was crawling with giant rats. This was what I had waited for. I hit the button, and there was the disgusting, overlong monster-transformation sequence. For some reason, they show your CG-ized hero's skin bloodily break off and crumble to the ground; there is thick beast-hair beneath it. Snap back to the game, and I'm a werewolf. The music has transformed from an ambient, windy, moody mess to a Dance Dance Revolution-sounding piece that one might imagine playing on a merry-go-round in Hell. It provides just the right rhythm for the werewolf to bounce around from crowd of enemies to crowd of enemies. It's on a thirty-second loop. Toward the end of the loop, somewhere in the background, there's this high-pitched squeal that sounds like a Commodore 64 rendering a wolf's howl. I'd heard that sound no less than a thousand times in my first clearing of the game. This time, though, after such a long walk down long halls (I was conserving the murder meter, you see), it arrived as hilarious punctuation. I fell over backward, my friend looked at me. "What's wrong with you?" she asked. I shook my head. The werewolf stood there getting pelted by rat-lasers for thirty seconds, until the howl sound came up again, and my friend sprayed tea into the air and touched her forehead to the straw-mat-floor.

So yeah, it can be pretty funny, if you know it well enough.

In closing, the Japanese title is ????? -- "JUUOUKI" -- "A Chronicle of the Beast King." That . . . sounds kind of cool. Almost makes you want to buy it.