For those of you who have dabbled in the XBLA version of Altered Beast, you’ll know that the difficulty of this version is plain ridiculous in terms of difficulty as it makes the Mega Drive version look like a cakewalk! Obviously this is the reason that they implemented a continue function in the game.

Rise from the grave? Nah I'll stay where I am thank you, you bearded git

But anyways, the enemies are a lot faster and cause a lot more damage than on the original console version making this achievement virtually impossible on the XBLA version, even on the easiest difficulty. The wolves that give you the orbs are nearly impossible to hit without taking damage and the standard enemies will take off a whole segment of life with just one hit, and that’s excluding the boss fights. Also they’ve ironed out the classic exploits for the bosses which were present in the SEGA versions making reaching the third level with all your lives intact almost impossible. King and I have tried this so many times and it’s not doable, and we’re both Mega Drive veterans! It’s not that we’re crap, it’s just that the game is fucking merciless!

One way I’ve seen online to do it is to save the game every single time you defeat an enemy without losing any health which creates a rather dull staccato like gameplay throughout and to be honest I wouldn’t feel like I got the achievement on merit if I relied on a constant save.

This game is hard, so putting in an achievement which is practically impossible I can understand would be rewarding for a very good gamer, but since everyone is doing it by exploiting the save feature, I’d rather try doing it on my own personal skill instead. Or boycott it. Either way I’m happy with because I could do without losing my temper. Neff wasn’t joking when he welcomed us to our doom!

Addendum 11/02/2011

After much perserverence, I got it!