Altered Beast (Arcade)

Couldn't find a box art for the arcade game

Altered Beast, a Mega Drive game I played at a classmates house some times. Got it for the Wii Virtual Console, the 3DS and and Sega Mega Collection for the PS3. And I played the arcade version of that game after unlocking it by playing the first stage with my youngest sister. Pretty much only was able to get to the boss of the second stage and after that the lives and continues was out, but in Arcade mode, guess what? Unlimited continues. And by brute forcing our way through we finished the game in what, 20 minutes? I guess difficulty was the length of this game.

The story is that Neff, some demon god kidnapped Athena so Zeus raises one or two centurions from their graves (with some so bad it is god synthesised speech). So they fight their way through 5 levels, collecting some power-up spheres to alter their form into different beasts, a werewolf, were-dragon, were-bear, were-tiger and a better werewolf. Worst is the were-bear since it doesn't have a long-ranged attack but must get close. Were-tiger is probably the best since you can even attack upwards . After defeating Neff (why couldn't it have been Hades or something like that? And why is roman centurions doing in an ancient greek setting?) it turns out it is some kind of movie production shown by "behind the scenes" footage like the main guy taking of his animal mask or some one with a clapper.

This game is sort of a nostalgic cult classic and I would lie if I didn't want to play it as a kid, but playing it as older, it's pretty much cheap with sluggish gameplay. At least the arcade version moves a bit fluently, but still it's rather hard.