Altered Beast

Altered Beast began life as a 1988 Sega arcade game and became famous as the pack-in title for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, but this entry is the MS-DOS conversion that arrived around 1990. The premise is pure late-80s arcade cheese in the best way: you're a fallen Roman-era warrior resurrected by Zeus with the immortal command "Rise from your grave," sent to rescue his kidnapped daughter Athena from the underworld lord Neff. What follows is a side-scrolling beat-'em-up where you punch and kick your way through hordes of the undead.

The hook that made it memorable is the transformation mechanic. Collecting the glowing orbs dropped by spectral white wolves powers up your character, and grabbing three turns your musclebound hero into a beast form, most iconically a werewolf, later a weredragon, weretiger and werebear, each with its own attacks. That gimmick, along with the digitized speech and the boss who taunts "Welcome to your doom," gave the game huge personality even though the actual combat is fairly simple and repetitive.

Judged today, Altered Beast is short and mechanically shallow, and the DOS port in particular struggles to match the arcade and Genesis versions in sound and animation. But it's a genuine artifact of its moment, a game everyone who owned a Genesis remembers, and there's still a goofy charm to bulking up into a werewolf and clobbering zombies. Play it for the atmosphere and the nostalgia rather than for depth.