Can you help me identify an arcade game?

[Nick1]

So there was a side-scrolling shooter game that came out FOREVER ago... you were basically flying a ship, moving left to right (I know, sounds like a few thousand others).

But the hook was you could collect other components of the ship... and one of the buttons would cause your ship to use those components to transform. You could switch to different configurations for different types of fire, and if you got all of the components, you actually transformed into a robot.

It was a side scroller but I feel like the view was top-down.

Anyone maybe have any clue what this game might have been called?

 

[FAST6191]

Do you know if it was Japanese or western?

New weapons does not narrow things down much and the main one I used to play that allowed transformation mainly had it as a "whenever you like" option where you traded speed and manoeuvrability for firepower.

 

[Nick1]

I'm pretty certain it was a U.S. release, but I'm not 100%.

I know it's really vague. I found one called "Finalizer" that's very similar, but I don't think that's it.

 

[Stwert]

Well now, that could be a lot of things, but I suppose Terra Cresta is the first to spring to mind, although the transformation part in that game was a phoenix IIRC. Crisis Force let you change between thee different ship formations. There's also Heavy Unit, which allowed progressive transformation into robot form.

Other than that, I'm drawing blank for now, hey its early and I've only had 1L of coffee today.