Cadillacs and Dinosaurs (UE) / Cadillacs: Kyouryuu Shinseiki (J)

[Source]
Tenchi o Kurau II -G.S.M. Capcom 7- / Alfh Lyra
Pony Canyon / Scitron  PCCB-00133  Aug 20, 1993

(Corroborated by its entry in 2012-04-22
 version of the BridgeM1 List Pack)

This licensed beat-'em-up by Capcom is based on
Mark Schultz's "Xenozoic Tales" comic,
popularly known as "Cadillacs and Dinosaurs"
thanks to the name of its first trade
paperback. It also came out two months before
another licensed comic book game of theirs,
"The Punisher." Like "The Punisher," you get to
brandish firearms against your enemies, but
they're separate pick-ups as opposed to a
sidearm you automatically draw against armed
thugs. For that matter, whereas "The Punisher"
is a gritty tale (at least in spirit) of one
man's mission of vengeance against crime,
"Cadillacs and Dinosaurs" is a pulp-influenced
tale of high adventure with a mechanic and his
friends working to protect what's left of the
dinosaur-populated environment from poachers
and other ne'er-do-wells who seek to harm it
for their own gain.

This is reflected in the soundtrack as well,
which, compared to "The Punisher's," _rocks
the hell out._ Digitized electric guitars are
everywhere, and even when they're not, the
sound is still energetic and melodious,
contributing to the fast-paced gameplay and
making the game's atmosphere just plain fun.
Nothing like running over tens of evil
poachers with a Cadillac in a desert while
shredding guitars herald your juggernaut of a
car. (Did you know you can beat that stage,
the third stage, without summoning your
Cadillac or losing it? You can if you're good
enough!)

This is also one of five games Capcom made
using the CP System Dash board, which was the
CP System I with anti-piracy encryption and
the QSound hardware later used in the CP
System II. The QSound chips are the relevant
part here, as they grant the soundtrack,
among other things, the ability to use
high-quality audio samples for all the
instruments. The music is thus made even
stronger with more authentic-sounding guitars
compared to what could've resulted if the
game was developed for the original CP System
with its FM chip and its sub-telephone
quality sample chip, and the rocking sound
comes through completely.

That said, there's something quite odd about
this soundtrack. Namely, how much of it goes
unused or unheard in the game. For instance,
there are "time over" and "name entry" tunes
you can never hear (both situations don't get
music changes), and a screaming guitar
"Overture" that's never played despite
opening the official album's entry for
"Cadillacs -The Four Heroes-." And speaking
of which, "Cadillacs" was quite clearly
composed to be the theme song, which you'd
hear when the game begins and when you're
driving off into the sunset during the
credits after crushing the bad guys. Except
on average, you'll only hear about fifteen
seconds of it in Stage 1 before you get
inside the building and the music changes,
and you'll only be able to hear a good
portion of it during the credits if you take
your time entering your initials. Pretty big
waste of a badass theme song, don't you
think? And that's not including the track
list oddities, like how "Cadillacs" and
"Ending 2" are separate tracks even though
they're both the same, and how two tracks
are labeled "Stage 3-A" and "Stage 3-B" even
though only the "Stage 3-A" one is used
(presumably, "Stage 3-B" was meant for when
you got in the Cadillac). These oddities are
preserved in this pack's tracklist for
accuracy reasons, except for the "Cadillacs"
and "Ending 2" case where I've stuck the
"Ending 2" label on the first track's name.

This pack was made using MAME 0.148 (modified
by Valley Bell), with the help of the game's
internal sound test mode. It wasn't hard to
trim this one, which I did by vgm_cmp'ing
each track to speed up the vgmlpfnd process
and whittling the maximum matching commands
down to 16 so I'd just have to look for the
loop among those many low-number clusters and
pick the one that matches. (I trimmed the
versions of the tracks that weren't
compressed, of course, after which I
compressed them as normal.)

One last note: the title of track 21 in
Japanese is two words separated by a dot, one
meaning "random shooting" and the other
meaning "brawl." However, both begin with the
same character, which among other meanings
signifies chaos and disorder. While other
translations (including the one on VGMDB) opt
to translate each word in the name with their
usual meanings, I translated them as "Wild
<whatever>" to preserve the effect.

Enjoy!

— The Golden Horse

Source: VGMRips