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There was nothing going on at Sega. Perhaps that's why they decided to hide the booth in a small room off a little-used hallway, apart from the show floor, where no one who found it did so by accident and few who did intend to take a look remembered to do so. Out of sight, out of mind. Yu Suzuki strolled around, gently sipping his bottomless Coca-Cola. Some other high-level Sega staff sat crosslegged on the carpet in the hall outside, chatting. No one paid attention.
It was getting late, and my hyperglycemia was acting up. My world gently began to spin. As Tim went to chase Suzuki, like the overactive puppy he is, I fell astray amongst the Astro Boy kiosks and Matrix Online posters. I looked around, feeling wistful for times past. Outside the Outrun 2 demo stations, there was so little Sega to show. The old Sega was incompetent, yet scrappy and lovable. This Sega was beyond fighting. It was convinced that the end was near, and was simply waiting.
So much of so little consequence. So little spirit. And yet, I was used to it. What had happened? I felt uncomfortable to feel as indifferent as I did toward a developer who had epitomized videogames for me, for so many years. Was this even really Sega, around me? Sega is a state of mind, more than anything. If that attitude is gone, does Sega exist any more? We mourn for those lost in a freak instant, yet we shrug off any death which is long in coming. For those whose personality is drifting away, to long disease or old age, death no longer seems such an evil.
Not so much discouraged as tired, I pushed my way to one of the darker corners of the booth, where the crowd was not so dense and my head would not feel so light. Next to game immemorable, I noticed a monitor with a more-recent trailer for Sega Wow's, formerly Wow Entertainment's, new interpretation of Altered Beast -- one of the least anticipated, and most forgotten, holdovers of the classic remake fad of a couple of years ago. The game was at the last E3, too. Or rather, another video was. How curious that, a full year later, Sega still has nothing but a tape to show. The game clearly is not the highest of priorities. At least they have yet to cancel it.
I was fascinated. Call me morbid; this remake has had me curious from the start. The original Altered Beast is dumb enough a game, even for its time. It is the story of a Roman centurion or two, risen from the grave by Greece's own Zeus (which rings better than "Jupiter", I guess), to save his daughter Athena (Minerva) from Hades (Pluto). At least, as far as I can remember. I don't think it matters much. The game is really about punching. You and a friend, as these centuria, traverse five auto-scrolling levels, punching zombies, Chicken Legs, and other famous Greek monsters; you collect "spirit balls" to gain enormous muscles that make your sprite bigger and even more not-gay, and which eventually turn you into one of four werebeasts (again all well-documented in Greek myth). Perhaps the best part of the game is the final round, which seems to be wholly comprised of pink, sticky corpses, frozen in various stages of agony. It reminds me of a dream I once had.
As far as I can see, the only reason the game remains so well-remembered is that everyone who bought a pre-Hedgehog Genesis got a copy for free. In 1989, the game could be as clumsy as it wanted if it looked and sounded as good as Altered Beast looked and sounded, next to the NES games that everyone had been raised on. Compared to, say, Astyanax, Altered Beast did seem damned impressive -- even sophisticated. I mean, it even had digitized speech. Sort of. Although garbled, Zeus's booming voice accompanies every game action -- from the "Power Up!" you hear with every spirit ball you collect, to the infamous command, "Rise From Your Grave!", with which the game begins.
Still, we forget easily. Or maybe we filter out the parts that make us smile. So Sega has decided to remake the game. I guess they figure that Greek gods no longer speak to the kids the way they usd to, as the new setup is, on the surface, more influenced by Hollywood B-horror -- or, I guess I should say, by the now-pervasive videogame interpretation of Hollywood zombie flicks (as seen in Resident Evil) -- than by a more traditional mythology. For all has been said, the new Altered Beast might even take place in the same videogame universe as Wow's own House of the Dead and Zombie Revenge.
What we seem to have, then, is a remake of a stupid game, with the more enlightened and unusual references from the original replaced by disposable popular garbage. And the project is by Wow Entertainment -- the development studio behind winners like Dynamite Cop and WSB2K1. Probably Sega's most retarded studio, in every sense of the word.
In short, this game is a potential masterpiece.
So, I stopped. I watched. It didn't look too bad. At least it seemed pretty enough, in its goopy way. Now there seemed to be a scientific, rather than a mystic, explanation for the beast transformations. The main character is some kind of special operative -- a Regan-era cop, or a CIA agent or ex-soldier or whatever -- who has apparently had some experiments done upon him. At certain moments, his flesh begins to burble and split and peel. Blood shoots out of every orifice, his bones snap and rearrange themselves, and he is genetically reformed, in some violent manner, into one or another monster. Both before and after transformation, the gameplay seems more or less like a 3D brawler. And heck, as repetitious as the genre is, you never can have too many brawlers. If they're done well.
Or, I never can. I don't think Brandon or Tim can either. Maybe you can. I don't know. Maybe it's just one of those things.
Despite the modern setting and the overly-gory effects -- or maybe because of them -- the game seemed to have a weird sort of integrity. In place of the werebears and weretigers of the original game, this new Altered Beast actually had some recognizable beasts, from all manner of world mythologies. I saw a minotaur, and a sasquatch. And the weredragon was back, in the guise of a simple dragon -- with, it seemed, his moves intact from the original game. I guess an all-around lightning move is even more appropriate in a 3D setting. The game kind of reminded me of some older Sega arcade projects like E-SWAT, in how goofy it was while attempting to take itself just seriously enough to seem earnest. This whole apparent project, in the game, of reviving mythological beasts through a human test subject -- project Altered Beast -- is an easy parallel. Where Wow is, against better judgement, reviving a well-remembered monster for modern consumption, they are doing the same within the game itself. It's a clumsy analogy, yet that's how you know it's at least slightly intentional. And would you really want Wow to try any deeper philosophy in a project like this?
The game promised to be stupid, yet honestly stupid. And maybe even a little old-fashioned. And it looks to have a strange subversive energy, that has been absent from Sega for a while now -- where it knows what it's doing, and you know what it's doing, and it knows you know what it's doing, yet it knows that the person standing behind you will never "get it".
As I got ready to wander away, the trailer began to loop. Only then I realized that I had walked into it, halfway through. At the start of the trailer, and at the start of the game, the main character wakes up in darkness. He sits up and pushes a stone slab off of his resting place. The camera pans up, and you can see your character rising from his grave.
...
Despite my lack of energy, I walked away encouraged. There are a few crumbs of Sega left. Sometimes you just have to look in the most unlikely places.
Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh
broke his arm riding a chicken-leg, once.
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