Saturday, May 02, 2015

Game Music: F-1 Dream (PC Engine)

As with most PC Engine games, this title has some freaking awesome music. Gets hard to hear with all the engine noise in the game, especially with the turbo on -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=civbSLk2HDA

F-1 Dream on the PC Engine is an enhanced port of the arcade F-1 Dream. The arcade title featured F3000 and F1 racing but was otherwise straightforward. The PC Engine version features one-on-one street races in a Porsche coupe for cash. After races you can solicit mechanics to join your team and upgrade both your street car as well as race car. More expensive mechanics can perform higher spec upgrades to your race car. Depending on your performance you are also moved around to different teams featuring cars with different characteristics. Win the F3000 championship to move up to F1 and do it all again with more powerful and difficult to control cars.

A ton of fun and once you figure out the menus no knowledge of Japanese is required. Just the same, I would love to see a fan translation of the dialogue.

As for the music, the arcade version (which served as a base for the PC Engine soundtrack but was ultimately expanded upon) was composed by Manami Matsumae - most well known for creating the music for the first Mega Man game. She composed a ton of music for Capcom for games including U.N. Squadron / Area 88, Carrier Airwing (one of my favorite arcade games), and contributed to the music for 1943 Kai (my all time favorite shooter). The PC Engine version of F1 Dream (heard here) was expanded upon by Yoko Shimomura who has too many game music credits to list, including Street Fighter II, Live A Live, Super Mario RPG (one of gaming's greatest soundtracks ever), Parasite Eve, the Kingdom Hearts series, the Mario & Luigi series and tons more.