Altered Beast "Despierta la Bestia Que Hay en Ti" 3:03

Time to awaken the beast within you! Chilean band ThePlasmas is back on the bestial attack, with Mauricio Plasma beefing up the swamp and palace stage theme from Sega's classic side-scrolling beat-'em-up Altered Beast! According to Mauricio, the goal for this piece from his Altered Storm Zone album was manifest the more altered, more beastly sound he'd want to hear from an in-person rock performance:

"Grabado para participar del evento Summer of SEGA de GameGrooves.

One of my favs from Altered Beast, a game that I played a lot when I was a child at the local arcade. I tried to do a straight-to-the-face rock song, including some harmonies, guitar solos, and a very powerful drum beat. That's how I imagined the OST if a rock band played those songs live."

Judge and fellow Chilean arranger jnWake was excited to provide his perspective on ThePlasmas (and I hope Wake and Mauricio eventually meet up, c'mon now!):

"¡Siempre es bueno ver más chilenos en OCR! El review tiene que ser en inglés si jeje.

Source is quite barebones, I'm interested to see how you covered it. Anyway, this begins with heavy guitars doing the intro, setting the tone for what comes after. At 0:09 we move to the first riff of the source, now featuring very intense drums and guitars. Makes it sound much more interesting than the original's soundscape tbh. Drums are super aggressive here [...] For this first section the source is translated pretty faithfully but the rhythm guitar has some neat variations that add a ton. Drum writing also adds a ton with the continuously changing snare pattern, from hitting on all beats, to hitting on beat 3, to the classic Stratovarius-esque fast pattern on 0:41. Rhythm guitars sound great, leads are well played [...] Riff around 1:13 is sweet. Around 1:31 we return to the main riff. [...] After that there's a couple repetitions and we eventually reach a guitar solo around 2:32. Some sick playing here with the fast wah notes. [...]

K, so on arrangement. Source usage is pretty clear but there's a ton of transformation done through the rhythm guitar riffs and drum patterns. Source is very repetitive and there's a bit of that in your remix but I feel you managed to create enough variations on both rhythm guitar and drums to make this interesting during its runtime. [...]

On production I am mostly positive, rhythm guitar tone is excellent and the drums are very punchy. [...]

Overall, this is a great, aggressive rock cover. You took a very (IMO) boring source and managed to turn it into something great."

As primitive as the gameplay can feel in today's context, I loved Altered Beast as a kid, so I thought it was a fine source tune choice, and of course Mauricio Plasma delivered an excellent rock expansion. Nice job varying up the instrumentation and textures to keep the presentation fresh, helpful for a relatively short source. The original soloing during the ending section was another highlight. Mauricio always does a great job fleshing out relatively brief themes and giving them a massive power upgrade. Be sure to get this so you can "POWER UP" with ThePlasmas! Otherwise, "welcome to your doom!" ;-D