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This Is the Run

This Is the Run: Altered Beast - Part 03

The only way to be truly powerful is to become another animal entirely. And then burp as a bear.

Gaming's greatest challenges, met head-on by gaming's greatest game players.

Feb. 8 2019

Cast: Vinny, Dan

Posted by: Abby

In This Episode:

Altered Beast

33 Comments

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DZLV

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So for the eyeball plant monster, all you have to do is get near him around where the initial eyeball is, NOT directly on his body, and shock him into next Tuesday. He dies almost instantly with two electric dragons.

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Sevith

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I'm not quite sure I understand how the game time on this is supposed to work. According to HLTB, it takes about an hour and a half to beat. Co-Op evidently speeds it up a bit, so let's knock that down to an hour. But like... it only took them 8 minutes here to beat 3 out of the 5 levels. How long must the last two levels be to make up for the nearly hour of game time that's apparently left?

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matthewgm

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@sevith said:

Sevith

I'm not quite sure I understand how the game time on this is supposed to work. According to HLTB, it takes about an hour and a half to beat. Co-Op evidently speeds it up a bit, so let's knock that down to an hour. But like... it only took them 8 minutes here to beat 3 out of the 5 levels. How long must the last two levels be to make up for the nearly hour of game time that's apparently left?

I think HLTB is flat out wrong.

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pyeeater

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I think this might beat them :P

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Anthony

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@sevith said:

Sevith

I'm not quite sure I understand how the game time on this is supposed to work. According to HLTB, it takes about an hour and a half to beat. Co-Op evidently speeds it up a bit, so let's knock that down to an hour. But like... it only took them 8 minutes here to beat 3 out of the 5 levels. How long must the last two levels be to make up for the nearly hour of game time that's apparently left?

You can see people speedrunning the game in 7 minutes on Youtube

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indigozeal

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Edited By indigozeal

I think the HLtB voters are counting their times *with restarts* - how long they were playing from when they first pressed start ever to when they actually beat the game, over multiple play sessions/continues/start-overs.

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Bane122

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For the first boss what I've always done is use the wolf's charge move back and forth. The spacing can be a bit weird though, you don't want to start too far to the left because you won't reach him, or too far to the right because you'll go into him. You might occasionally go too far into him and be bounced back, which can lead to a head hitting you if you're unlucky, but I think it might work better than spamming the fireballs. It's a pretty quick kill.

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Sessh

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I had forgotten that this game actually wasn't all that good. Oh boy.

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dasakamov

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I don't even know what "HLTB" is.

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drew327

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When the game was revealed for this series, my first thought was: "but that game sucks."

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edmundus

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@dasakamov: 'How Long to Beat', it's a website that (in theory) tells you the time investment needed to finish a game.

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JeedyJay

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They didn't make it to the enemy that ended the previous Practice Run. Has that happened before?

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D_W

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I don't care about the quality of the game, that song when you go beast and the game over jam fucking rip. So it's one of the most important games of gaming.

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nthnmllr

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The only video game I owned for the early parts of my life was Mario 3 and I'm glad I owned that and not this

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vedicardi

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great run. wonder what game they will do next

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SubwayD

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Going to have a wild opinion here: The game is rubbish but I still really like it.

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sweetz

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Edited By sweetz

@matthewgm: @sevith: How Long To Beat times are user submitted and unfortunately they don't make it super clear what play time is supposed to mean. As far as I know, the intent is how long it took from when you first sat down with the game having never played it before, until you saw end credits/screen. Meaning it is not the time for one "run", but rather your total play time including deaths and restarts until you learned the game well enough to beat it. This is a more useful metric for how much you can expect to "get out of a game" than the time for one run.

For Altered Beast it seems that people submitting times stuck to that intent. In the case of something like Contra: Hard Corps, it appears most people seem to have misunderstood and posted the time for one run.

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greebman

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It's a joy to see a new episode have the same length so I know they still get messed up in the burp zone

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soybomb43

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I feel like they need to memorize enemy placement to get anywhere in this game but the levels are too uninspired and boring to remember when you only play once a day.

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Geejay22

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I still think Altered beast is a good game. There are strats that break the game basically.

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Asakusa_A18

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I think they should watch a speedrun of the game they play after they finally beat it. Just like they did in KSP

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Raven10

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As someone who never owned this game back in the day, when I first played it on some PS2 compilation I recall wondering what the big deal was since the game seemed like it really sucked. Glad I am not alone in that assessment. I feel like there are at least a dozen less well known Genesis action games that are much better that they could have played.

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mathey

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I think when I saw this in an arcade back in the day, it was impressive because of the big old sprites, the voices, and the booming audio. Also bad guys would break apart gorily.

But wow does it not hold up. Yikes.

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indigozeal

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I feel like they need to memorize enemy placement to get anywhere in this game but the levels are too uninspired and boring to remember when you only play once a day.

A succinct assessment of the core problem.

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KnockingNick

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Yeah...this game really isn't good.

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DarkeyeHails

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I am baffled as to why they are having so much difficulty, I remember beating it all the time as a kid and I was a pretty dumb kid.

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CurrySpiced

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Vinny maybe should have explained his new strat before they started the game, poor Dan sounded like he was going to have an aneurism when he was yelling at Vinny to grab the orb.

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Edited By YummyTreeSap

@mathey said:

Mathey

I think when I saw this in an arcade back in the day, it was impressive because of the big old sprites, the voices, and the booming audio. Also bad guys would break apart gorily.

But wow does it not hold up. Yikes.

It's overall not a good game, but the arcade version is nevertheless still a pretty huge improvement over the Genesis/Mega Drive port. Looks better, animates much better, feels a bit tighter. That doesn't ultimately change all that much, but it's better.

And despite all that, I still have a weird fondness for this game even while knowing that it's not good.

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Superharman

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Unlike the other runs, they're largely trying to brute force this one rather than thinking about a plan. I'm sure it'll get to that point eventually...or maybe not.

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Dryker

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Yes... this game is not as good as we may remember. But yes... it's an iconic game of yesteryear. And yes... I'd buy an Altered GBeast shirt if they ever made one. Fobwashed, sir, please make it happen. I'd suggest designs, but I'm sure yours would be better.

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bradito

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This Is The Run Bad Video Game

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Mechanized

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This is worth playing for the Game Over jam. That's the real reward.