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Altered Beast (Sega Master System)

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Title Screen

Altered Beast

Developers: Sega R&D2[1]
Publishers: Tonka (US), Sega (EU), Tec Toy (BR), DOTTS (SWANA)[2]
Platform: Sega Master System
Released in US: June 1989[3]
Released in EU: June 1989[4]
Released in BR: 1989


MusicIcon.png This game has unused music.
SoundIcon.png This game has unused sounds.


The Master System port of Sega's classic arcade brawler. They still didn't forget the voice clips, people.

While the preceding Genesis port of the morph n' kick adventure was met with a warm but passive welcome thanks to it being a pack-in title, the Master System version turned out to be a rather disheartening outcome. Accompanied by passable graphics and sound, players were met with a choppy logical/visual framerate of 8 FPS, which was further marred by poor scrolling and awkward collision detection. Stage 3 was removed from this version.

This is one of the easier cartridges to find for the Master System. While a relative success, its older Genesis and System 16 sisters are more fondly remembered.

Unused Music

Hmmm...
To do:
SMSPower has some registers for music IDs. See here... See if there's something more inside the game

Three drafts of the the intermission music are present in the data. It appears the intermissions were originally going to be included, but were excised possibly due to size concerns. Altered Beast for the Genesis was 512 kilobytes / 2 megabits, but this version is 256 kilobytes / 1 megabit.

Unused FM Audio

Altered Beast features support for the otherwise Japan-only FM Sound Unit. Unlike the case of Rampage, Altered Beast doesn't appear to have had any plans for a Japanese release. The only Japanese magazine that mentions it (mentioned here in page 123) references it as an American import and didn't make any mention of the FM audio. FM audio is programmed in this game like the other FM Sound Unit supported games: all sound effects and music are created using the chip with no PSG audio, as the FM Sound Unit could not mix both audio sources.

Game over (Non-FM) Game over (FM)

Unused Sounds

Two sets of repeated noise. Purpose unknown (perhaps a leftover from another game?)

References

  1. Two members of Sega R&D2 and one in the Sega sound department worked on this game (Katsuhiro Hasegawa, Naoto Ohshima, and Kazuhiko Nagai). Unlike the Genesis version, everyone was uncredited in Master System Altered Beast, so it's more likely others worked on it.
  2. Manuals of Arabic-language games
  3. Computer Entertainer, "1989 July" (17 July 1989, page 13)
  4. Bristol Evening Post (15 June 1989, page 83)