I remember seeing the Master System advertised with Altered Beast as a low-cost alternative to buying the Genesis with Altered Beast in a Sears Wish Book.
Those Sear wish books were so great. I remember seeing stuff like the 7800 & Master System in there and being so curious about these things that I never saw anywhere in person.
Slightly off-topic observation: Interesting that the arcade version didn’t have parallax scrolling while the Genesis version did, since the latter featured various graphical cutbacks overall.
As a kid, the SMS port of this game caused me to rage so hard to throw the controller and break it, and subsequently get grounded with no console access for months.
It's been over 30 years, and seeing the ridiculously tiny enemies in the Master System version still never fails to crack me up. What a trainwreck of a port.
Lol! This port is pretty horrible but just wait until tomorrow with the NES version. It's actually better with gameplay but the enemies are even smaller.
@@RetroComparisonsIt's downright adorable... and also the best version of the game, if you're someone who genuinely believes a lack of content was the only thing holding back the arcade and Genesis's glorified tech demo. So many hypocrites expose themselves... Personally, I adore 8-bit ports of 16-bit games that replace everything with a collection of miniatures, to avoid over taxing the CPU. It's coming from a place of ethical apathy.
@@juststatedtheobvious9633 The downscaled ports also fascinate me, hence the reason I have so many videos comparing different generations. I do think in most cases making things smaller for the sake of better gameplay is almost always the way to go. Even if the NES port isn't great it's so much more playable than this mess on the SMS.
I've only played a tiny bit of this port and that's been a long time ago. Like 95% of my time with Altered Beast period was on my uncle's copy of the Genesis port. But, I've played through the arcade version a few times since. The arcade version is certainly the winner here in this comparison. The SMS version is okay though. The colors are not great, but I'm not sure they could have been better given the limited palette. The sprites are okay, but everything is slow and a bit choppy. I think it sounds good for an SMS game. If all you had was the Master System at the time, I think it would have been okay.
I've played the Genesis version so many times throughout my life so it's my go-to version even though the arcade port is superior. The SMS port is pretty bad overall. It looks fairly nice but it's borderline unplayable with the choppiness. Still though, I think you're right that if this was all you had back then you'd probably be happy with it the same way I was totally satisfied with the 2600 ports of Pac-Man and many others.
Despite the small enemies the quality of the sprites is pretty freakin nice on the SMS. No way the NES could pull it off. The arcade is an instant classic tho! Winner: Arcade The SMS seemed overly difficult and that is a shame, cheap misses or enemy shots would make that one frustrating to play even if it looked pretty good from just watching. Thank you for powering through that one for us!
This is a great example of a game looking great but failing badly at gameplay. Before trying the SMS port for the first time years ago I'd heard bad things about it but when watching clips it looked great. Playing it though is another story and you're right on the money with this being full of cheap misses and cheap enemy shots. I'm pretty decent at this game on the Genesis but I could not for the life of me get past the 2nd level of the SMS port.
Given how garbage the game plays on the Master System, even compared to the Famicom version, I'd say the sprite size/game speed tradeoff wasn't worth it.
Nice comparison. It doesn't look horrible just not quite as good as the arcade, one thing I've noticed is the speed difference almost looks like the MS version is lagging at times but I totally get it, sometimes things like that happen and sacrifices have to be made. The graphics for the MS conversion don't look bad though.
Thanks buddy! This is one of those style over substance type of ports. I think it looks really nice for an 8 bit rendition but the lag makes it almost unplayable. I've beaten the Genesis port numerous times in my life but couldn't even get past the dragon stage in this one.
One reason for the lag and jerkiness is that a lot of what you see on screen, including I believe your character, is background tiles instead of sprites. They really pushed the limit of that type of hack with this one, and even more with Golden Axe.
So, the clever thing about this is that the Master System can flip background tiles. Using them for the player's many different forms wasn't necessarily a bad idea... But they aren't the most responsive option. According to the guy who did the Tyris Flare hack for Master System, it's even worse if you calculate how the fake sprite overlaps background details. So why make that fake, CPU eating compromise, as big as humanly possible? It just makes the impressive enemies look pathetic, and the entire game is a chore to play. Arcade ports like this one, almost make me think the success of the Genesis had more to do with the mistakes of NEC and NES, rather than Sega getting their act together.
That actually makes way more sense as to why this port is so unplayable, and Golden Axe for that matter. It's one thing to see a game like this in a magazine and another to actually play it and this port looks like it was made for still shots.
That's true. As much as I don't like this port I bet that if I only had a SMS and this was one of the few games I had I probably would have played it a lot.
I think, but not entirely sure, that it is using background graphics as sprites, since normal sprites can't be that "large". But background tiles update at a lower rate hence the choppiness.
