City Connection is a port of a platform arcade game developed and published by Jaleco in 1985 for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The protagonist of the game was a girl in the Japan release. But in the U.S. NES version, the protagonist was a guy.
I have played this game in the past through pirated Famicom (Japan version of NES) game cartridges containing many games that were sold cheap in the Philippines.
The Story
Your mission is to race your speedy hatchback compact car from New York to Tokyo in record time. But the enemy and the police are after you. Can you make it or not?
The Graphics and Sound
The game has fairly simple graphics. The cars and the backgrounds are easy to distinguish. The car designs are simple. Your car is orange-red, the police cars are blue and white.
The backgrounds are so damn average. And they are easily identifiable. London, Paris, and New York are recognizable because of their landmarks. The backgrounds in this game are done well but not the best on the NES.
The graphics get kind of repetitive. Your car will never change to something better. The enemies only have a little bit of variety depending on the country. All obstacles look the same and have slight animation. Cars got a few animations in them. The cats are lifeless. Not a great game to show the graphics ability of the NES.
Graphics in this game in general are a small bit above mediocre.
The music is funky, repetitive but mysteriously catchy! It is impossible to forget and I am a bit ashamed to admit that I like it. A few sound effects are used for the limited actions and collisions.
The Gameplay
You drive painting the highways white with your car in different cities while avoiding the police, a few cats, and later obstacles.
Once you paint every highway on the level, more stages to repeat this process come next, and so on all the time.
The controls are a bit hard to master but they are responsive. The car moves by itself and you only have to change the directions and jump.
You only get some oil tanks per level to shoot at those police cars and ram them. Getting a balloon will enable you to skip stages.
My Verdict
City Connection is an interesting game, simple and unique. It is a good time killer but no more than that. If the difficulty was downed a bit, I would enjoy it more. I give it a fair score for being original.
Play it on the NES, on emulators or free online for curiosity's sake. See if you'll like it.
Upvoted by HGC!