Growl (W) / Runark (J)

[Source]
Runark / Gun Frontier
Scitron / Pony Canyon  PCCB-00060  Apr 21, 1991
[Generator]
MAME 0.248 (modded by Valley Bell)

What do you get when you combine a 1990s
environmentalist "save the animals" theme with
a beat 'em up? If you're Taito, the result is
one of the higher-octane beat 'em ups in
arcades, with the game regularly filling the
screen with double-digit numbers of enemies
(which is impressive for arcade hardware of
the time). Play as a bootleg Indiana Jones
with up to three other players as you destroy
poachers with guns, whips and the occasional
sword, and receive nick-of-time assistance
from the animal kingdom as it smashes your
opponents to a pulp! It's so over the top that
it's admirable.

This larger-than-life game naturally comes with
an epic soundtrack, and it delivers on numerous
fronts in both slow and fast moments. In
particular, "Rune & Ark" is probably one of the
best tracks that the Zuntata band has created.
So much so that when I found out the previous
version of this pack had the track trimmed too
short, I took the time to do a relog of it to
its correct length--and then went on to relog
the rest of the pack for consistency, given how
much MAME has developed in 10 years. The old
version also had a half-second of silence at
the start of each track for no apparent reason,
so I took care of that as well.

The track titles in this pack were sourced
from the "Runark / Gun Frontier" CD release,
whose track list is shown differently on the
back of the case and within the insert. I chose
the insert version of the tracklist, which
includes contextual labels for where they're
heard (even if they seem weird), and the
Japanese tags retain the formatting and
grammatical strangeness from the original.

Also sourced from the CD is the presentation
of track 3, which assigns a single title to
both the coin-insertion jingle and the music
which plays if you wait long enough at the
title screen afterward. These are two separate
sound codes in the game data, and in fact
the second will not play if you press Start
too quickly! For track 3, I logged the direct
output of the game in this situation; however,
I've also provided the two tracks separately
if you wish to listen to them that way.
The "Coin" track is truncated on account of
its length otherwise deriving from an
excessively long decay rate on the last FM
instruments heard; if you raise the jingle
pause in your VGMPlay settings, you'll hear
that they will not fully fade out until
after a *full minute* of playtime has passed.

At any rate, enjoy!

-The Golden Horse

— The Golden Horse

Source: VGMRips