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.

Son, Be A Deeennntiiist...

I'm really trying to get back into the swing of updating the site with content.  However, as I am well aware, things rarely go as planned.  Currently I'm fighting one hell of a toothache that has nearly incapacitated me over the past few days.  Well that's really not entirely true, I'm still able to get on with the daily grind but it has a tenancy of sacking me right when I get ready to do something outside of routine.  One of those things would be creating site content.

My commitment is still to DVGI and classicplastic.net - always has been.  However I may miss my RTM column(s) this time around due to not being able to finish them off due to the pain.  Even writing this isn't being accomplished under the best conditions.

What I can say is that I'm changing some of my collecting priorities and getting back into the TurboGrafx-16.  I regretted selling my TurboDuo the same week it left my hands, same goes for the last straight TG-16 lot that I had.  So I'm building it back up, enjoying the games, realizing how the prices have been on a steady increase and don't seem to be leveling off.  I've got a TG-16 system (AV modded it within the first hour of it showing up at my door), TurboTap, a second TurboPad on the way and some of my favorite games.  The big one being Final Lap Twin which regardless of what anyone may say about it, it's my favorite game on the system.

Also have Dungeon Explorer, Vigilante, Victory Run and a few other of the more common classics of the system.  The Legendary Axe, Bonk's Adventure and more are on the way.  I'm going for HuCARDs only right now although I did keep a few CD games when I got rid of everything else a couple years ago.  I'll probably end up region modding my system within the year since I also kept a couple PC Engine games (I think Bari Bari Densetsu is fun, I'm serious).  Right now though it's all about HuCARD games, trying to make sure the titles I get are game / case / booklet - I don't care to go for boxes.  For games that were box / plastic tray and didn't come in cases, then game / booklet is fine by me.

I'm going to keep my spending on it controlled, buy what I like when the price is right, and just really enjoy playing one of my all time favorite consoles (right there with the NES and Vectrex).