As is the case with my series of MS-DOS retrospectives that kicked off over the weekend, this concurrent series aims to shed some similar spotlight on a similar type of game.
Everyone remembers the Oregon Trails of the world—or in the case of this series, DOOM 2—but more should be said about the… well, you’ll see. Here we remember the forgotten favorites of a similar era, segregated only by the slight technicality of being made for Windows 95.
Battle Beast (1995), BMG Interactive
The front cover of Battle Beast would probably be in the top three if I had to rank the defining images of my early youth. I was obsessed with it; the animals were so cute and so scary at the same time.
Granted that this was a time period when blood in video games was a cluster of 24 bright red pixels jaggedly sewn together to form a blob with 90-degree angles, but I still didn’t want to play this game in the dark without my nightlight. That’s still partly the case.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that my favorite part of the game used to be watching the pre-recorded gameplay sequences that would roll when I didn’t do anything on the main menu for a long time. It should be a testament in and of itself to just how cool the art and the idea of this game is that I treated it like a two-minute-long movie instead of something I should actually play—especially after the fit that I pitched at CompUSA demanding that my mom proves that she truly loves me and buys me this damn game.
I dig the intricacy and realness of the plots of today’s games, but there’s something fantastic about the unabashedly cartoony nature of these games from twenty-something years ago.
In Battle Beast, the maniacal Toadman unleashes his army of carnivorous toads in cities all across the country. One might assume that this sounds like a job for animal control or local police, possibly even the CDC; one would also be wrong. The army, apparently having given up themselves, is asking for the help of six cutesy, stuffed-looking animals that have the ability to turn into menacing mechanical-animal street fighters.
Where has this creative department gone and how can we make sure they’re on the Fallout 4 team?
Hardly seems like a fair fight.
Battle Beast is probably one of the handful of games on either of these series that is truly worth checking out whether or not you played it as a kid—assuming of course that playing that a hybrid of Mortal Kombat and a bad trip involving Tiny Toons is something that appeals to you.
It’s a pretty straightforward campaign that is identical on every playthrough, but the aesthetics of the fights are still unique enough to keep one’s attention, and the six animal characters are interesting and different enough to want to beat the game with all of them.
VERDICT: Battle Beast should come pre-installed on every single copy of Windows.
Previous retrospectives:
Sink or Swim
