City Connection

City Connection

Publisher: Jaleco

Developer: Jaleco

Consoles: Nintendo Entertainment System, Arcade

Sometimes a game comes along that's a little too weird to explain in terms of plot, gameplay, or why it's fun. I'd say City Connection falls into this category. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the hell out of this game. It's just... well, odd.

You're a suave guy (or a pretty girl in the Japanese version) on a mission to ride on all the roads in the world's most popular locales, and to leave your mark doing so. Driving your Honda City, you paint the roads you've driven on. However, the police don't take too kindly to you fucking their city's roads up, and look to take you out in the process. Meanwhile, you also need to avoid cats and, occasionally, spikes, as to not damage the car so you can continue your worldwide journey of messing everyone's shit up.

A platforming driving game. Huh.
The game is a 2D side-scrolling platformer, in a sense. You drive your dinky little car around, painting the roads as you do. You can collect cans of oil, the more of which upon completing the level that you have the better your score will be, but they can also be used as ammo against the police. Cats, meanwhile, are miserable little shits that cannot be taken out, and running into one will have it comically fly off the screen, costing you a life in the process. Spikes appear when a player keeps u-turning in the same spot to idle or stall, and, like police cars, causes your car to explode upon a single touch.

Your car NEVER stops moving. All you can do is turn left or right, hop up to higher roads, and hop over gaps to reach other roads. Occasionally balloons will float by, and collecting three of them will warp you to a new city. It sounds simple enough, until you're trying to get the last piece of road, killing three cops at once, and a fucking cat comes out of nowhere. Those fucking cats really piss me off...

FUCKING CAAAAAAT!!!
Meanwhile, the music in the game is really catchy chiptuned classical pieces. Hitting a cat causes it's own jingle (classical piece "Der Flohwalzer," or "Neko Funjatta" in Japanese), and the main theme is variations on Tchaikovsky's "Allegro non troppo e molto maestoso" from Piano Concerto No. 1. Not necessarily Soundtrack of the Year, but it's still fun for an NES and arcade title.

The police in each city have different vehicles. Neat!
Another enjoyable title. The NES had simpler, fun titles back in its time, while it seems the later the systems go the more the focus becomes fixated on graphics. City Connection fits that simple, fun example, and surprised me in being far more enjoyable than I originally thought it would be.