Rise from your grave, and do not trust Bill's brother Patrick.

Today’s review is Altered Beast for Sega Genesis. I chose this tape because it opens with an interesting line that's stuck with me through the years. When God tears your soul out of Heaven, stuffs it back into your dead body and commands you to go forth and kill his enemies, he says “Rise from your grave.” Spoken out loud in a weird, dribbly voice. Anyone who grew up playing this tape has said "Wise Fwom Yow Gwabe" to someone more than once.

The game begins and lightning strikes your gravestone and you explode out of it, back to life and ready to do His will: collecting power orbs, altering into beasts, and slogging through short, badly designed auto-scroll stages.

After a joyless ten minutes, you beat the game, say “Whelp, that was terrible, time to never play this again,” and toss it into a drawer until you trade it to Jeff Esham for Decap Attack a few months later.

The line about resurrection at the beginning is a pretty cool way to start out a video game, however. Though I can't help being reminded of the time my friend Bill wose fwom his gwabe after he huffed fumes from his dad’s gas hole.

I got Altered Beast in 1990, when it was still being bundled with the Sega Genesis. The next year, Sega replaced it with Sonic The Hedgehog, which was a real slap in the power orbs to us early adopters.

A few days after I completed Altered Beast’s abysmal stages and seen its "who gives a shit" style ending, I walked over to my buddy Bill’s house across the street. He wanted to show me his new compound bow, which I didn't care about at all but figured I would pretend to because I liked his house. It seemed fancy, everything in it was pink, even the walls. Can you believe that? All these years later, I still consider pink to be a color of royalty.

I'd barely knocked on his front door when it flew open, like he was standing on the other side waiting for me. His eyes were wide and he blurted “Hey, do you wanna do HUFFING?”

I said "What, you mean like breathe heavy?" I thought maybe it was some kind of archery technique. I don't know anything about bows and arrows.
Bill rolled his eyes and said "No, dumb ass. Huffing. Like huffing some gas."

His expression signaled it was time to say "Oh, okay, right," and then play along, hoping I’d get enough context clues to avoid looking like a dipshit, wimp, or moron. Back then I was in a constant state of gambling for context clues. This has not really changed, in all honesty.

Once inside, Bill led me down to the cheery, pink-carpeted and pink-furnished basement and through the door to the garage, where his older brother Patrick was waiting beside his dad’s Harley. (Hog, according to their dad Mike.) There was no compound bow to be seen, but there was a poster of Tawny Kitaen, the girl from all those Whitesnake music videos hanging on the wall. She was wearing a black business jacket and fishnet stockings instead of pants and I briefly wondered what job she wore that to. The mystery deepened.

Patrick looked up at us as we entered, his eyes squinted and a dreamy smile on his face. He waved us over as he shoved a thin wooden rod down into the uncapped fuel tank of the Hog, wedging the spring-loaded flap open.

"Hey man, you wanna go first?" Patrick asked me. His voice was light, coquettish, even. He giggled as he watched me through half-closed lids. A sharp contrast to his usual tough guy demeanor.

Seeing him act this way formed an icy pit in my stomach.

"Uh, no, that's okay. Bill can go first."

I still had no idea what the hell we were doing, but since it involved the neighborhood bad boy Patrick, who was acting more frightening than usual, I knew I should not be the one to go first.

My decision-making may have been out of whack as a kid, but my initial gut reactions were usually correct. Most days I ignored them. That day I was scared enough to listen.

Bill, always wanting to act cool and brave, walked forward immediately and said, "I'm ready." He was making his voice sound deep on purpose and I would have giggled, had I not been so nervous.

Patrick looked at him and said "Okay, put your mouth over the gas hole and breathe it in deep, then hold it for as long as you can." As instructed, Bill took a deep breath and held it for a few seconds, and then wheezed out, slow but forceful, like he was trying to hold his breath but some giant invisible hand was squeezing it out of him. His eyes were open but rolled all the way back, making him look sort of like the Undertaker, my favorite wrestler in those days. So that's what huffing is, I thought. It's something stupid.

After what felt like forever, Bill started coughing and gasping for air, then fell backwards. When he landed, he bounced his skull off the concrete floor. I'll never forget the sound, like dropping a wooden bowl on the kitchen hardwood. Then Bill didn’t move.

Panicking, believing Bill to be dead, I started to cry (I was only 13, and that's an OK thing to cry about. It didn't make me a baby.) Patrick, already “huffed up” broke into hysterical laughter. Their mom Barb must have heard me crying and screaming that Bill was dead.

I heard her thundering down the basement stairs full-speed before she burst into the garage and started to go crazy, screaming "What happened!?"

That was Enough for me. I bolted past Barb as she knelt down by Bill, past Patrick who was now doubled over with laughter, past Tawny and her inexplicable outfit, and booked my ass upstairs. In less than thirty seconds I was out the front door, across the street and standing in our living room yelling for my mom at the top of my lungs.

She rushed in from the kitchen and, seeing my tears, asked me what was wrong in a calm voice. I never knew my mom to panic, she always kept her head no matter what. The total opposite of how I operate, it's an ability I’ve envied my entire life. Now that she’s gone, it’s what I remember and appreciate about her the most. She had a way of making the worst situations seem survivable.

Inconsolable, I sputtered out a recap of what just happened at Bill’s house. She cocked her head, puzzled, and asked simply, “What’s huffing?”

I managed to tell her it’s when you open the gas hole of a Hog and breathe in the fumes and then pass out or act creepy.

“Well why did they do that?”

I said “I don’t know, but I didn’t do it and I never will.” Catching my breath at last, I told her I'm pretty sure Bill is dead now, the only friend I ever had who’d seen me beat Duck Tales in one day. He was dead and I saw it happen and I didn’t do anything to stop it.

She hugged me, assured me that Bill wouldn’t die, then told me to get ready for dinner. She went back into the kitchen to finish cooking as I stood there shaking, replaying what just happened in my head. How could she be so calm about this? Didn't she understand?

But to my surprise, she was right. The next day, after a sleepless night filled with worry, I arrived at school to find Bill alive and well. He didn’t even have a bandage on his head. He was laughing and joking around with our class outside the main doors while waiting for the bell to ring.

His first order of business when I joined the line was to tell everyone how I wouldn’t huff, and that I was a wimp who was scared of getting high. He also added (in a true gas-altered beast fashion) that I cried and ran away when he got “ripped up as hell on The Huff" and how awesome it was to “get high as balls.”

He failed to mention that “ripped up as hell” meant “immediately lose consciousness and end up sprawled out on the floor with his mom slapping his cheeks, while Altered Patrick giggled like a deranged Victorian school girl.”

I got made fun of for two weeks because of that betrayal.

The joke was on all the kids at school in the end, because Bill would still come to my house and be my friend in secret and play my tapes and hang out with me. He only ignored me and acted like I was a coward in front of everyone at school.

So in the end I was not the loser after all.

Only everyone else.

Altered Beast is a terrible game.

Final Score: 2/10

(Altered Patrick 0/10)