Rinsed Rubbish Games

Rinsed Rubbish Games

(This suggestion from @JollyNiceSoup)

Games you rinsed as a kid even though they were definitely s***[ref]Naughty. This is a family blog.[/ref].

I have mentioned before that as a child I had a Sinclair ZX Spectrum+. It loved it very much and had many hundreds of games, mainly from magazine cover cassettes, car boot sales, and Dirty Pirate C60 Tapes. As a result of an abundance of games, and the twin facts of 1) games were hard back then, and 2) I was rubbish at games back then, very few were ever completed. Also, really bad games were simply ignored after a couple of goes because I had other far better games to play.

What I’m saying is, that there were few games I “rinsed” and none of them were terrible.

Moving on a bit, to my early teens, I got a Sega Mega Drive. I loved it very much too, but although I now have many hundreds of games for it, back then games were too expensive to buy frequently and/or on a whim and piracy was impossible. Every game purchase had to be considered carefully so crap games rarely found their way into my possession.

Apart from, of course, Altered Beast.

Altered Beast
Those balls are bears. Also, those bears are balls.

As we all know, Altered Beast was the worst possible pack-in game Sega could have included with the Mega Drive when it was released in Europe. Apart from, perhaps, the very similar but maybe even worse Last Battle, so I suppose we dodged a bullet there. Only to be hit by another one, or something.

Altered Beast was never even that good in the arcade. It had nice big chunky sprites and impressive sound samples and was incredibly loud. In the early 90s you could hear “POWER UP!” and “ROARRRRRRRRRAWOOOWWWWW!” over the top of virtually every other machine in the arcade, except perhaps “WE! ARE! COSMO GANG!” and “PLACE YOUR BETS NOW PLEASE!”.

Despite all this impressiveness, it was awful. Boring, slow, repetitive. The mechanic of killing white flashing wolves to get power ups is flawed, because in order to do so you normally need to know where they’re going to appear before they do, and when you do, a nudge from a baddie can mean you miss your chance to collect it. Also, missing it extends the length of the level as you only reach the boss after collecting three of them (and so can turn into your beast form) unless you miss so many you end up almost powerless when the boss turns up anyway.

Altered Beast
Tiger! Tiger! Tiger Uppercut!

The Mega Drive version is almost the same game, only all the good bits (the sprites, the sounds) are watered down and the bad bits (the slowness) are exacerbated. It isn’t a bad conversion really, but there wasn’t much good to begin with.

However, I only had two games for my Mega Drive for a long time. Sonic the Hedgehog and Altered Beast, and although Sonic was played (and boy did I rinse that) a great deal, Altered Beast also got hammered. As it turned out, that only took a day – I received the console and game for Christmas, and on Boxing Day it’d been completed. Thankfully, I’d not spent £35 on it.

Over the following weeks and months, I tried to get as much out of it I could. There’s a cheat that lets you change which beast form is assigned to each level, so that added variety for a while. I seem to remember one of the levels is near impossible with the bear, but I managed it anyway. I’d play through the game avoiding power-ups just to make it last longer. I tried to finish it on a single life, which I was never able to do, but did complete a few levels that way. I eked every bit of possible fun from the game, and then some, but it remained terrible.

Luckily, I had Sonic. Lovely, glorious Sonic. Phew.

(Featured image is from here, is unmodified, and used under this licence)

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  1. Pingback: The worst games I've ever completed - deKay's Blog

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