Next-Gen Games Still Can't Hold A Candle To The Wow Factor Of Altered Beast

gamespot.com:

Altered Beast is celebrating its 35-year anniversary today, June 14, 2023. Below, we look back at why the highly derided game is so memorable to a generation of gamers.

Altered Beast is one of those games that most hardcore gamers know and probably don't actually like. Most retrospectives focus on how terriblly it's aged, a legacy cemented by a couple of atrocious sequels on the GBA and PS2. And yet somehow, it's a game that is still considered an undeniable classic. So why is a game so widely regarded as a joke still enjoy such high name identification? Like many games that awkwardly found their footing when the medium was in its infancy, the shortest answer is «you had to be there.»

Unlike poorly aged breakthrough games like Adventure or the original Street Fighter, Altered Beast doesn't have the easy cultural cache of being the first at anything, aside from being the very first Genesis game ever produced. But anyone who was a self-aware gamer at the time remembers the first time they heard Zeus-as-played-by-Elmer-Fudd telling our nameless Roman champion player character to «wise fwom his gwave». Everyone laughs now, but at the time? It sounded like the future being born. It's hard to really explain to anyone younger than 35 what lo-fi voices coming out of a video game in your home felt like in the '80s. Arcade games had been doing it for some years, of course, but the gulf between what arcade games were doing and what home consoles were capable of was enormous. Playing a game on your NES was lighting a firecracker in your backyard. Arcade games felt like NASA.

What's been forgotten over the years, and what Altered Beast should stand as a persistent reminder of, is how little of that gap had to do with simple