times its own height, land on a platform, and keep driving? Can you throw oil at a police

car and knock it off the road without suffering any damage to your own vehicle? Can you get

5000 points for doing so? I get the feeling the answers to all of those will be "busted,"

but that didn't stop City Connection. This old-school arcade classic about painting roads

around the world hit the NES back in 1988, when exactly this kind of abstraction and

moderately Pac-Man-like behavior was condoned in the video game world.

What exactly is going on here depends on which version you're playing. The US version presents

us with this blonde joker, who's presumably stolen a heck of a lot of paint which happens

to be leaking out of his car, and by covering all the roads (including the inexplicable

suspended tracks) with paint he evades the police? Yeah, doesn't make much sense, so

let's try again. According to the original Japanese version, you're in fact playing as

a woman named Clarice, who's driving an '81 Honda City (hence the name), and while on

a whirlwind tour of the world all Carmen Sandiego-style you've hit upon the bright idea of painting

every road you drive on just because you've been there. No less strange, perhaps even

more so, but at least there's some rationale. But you're probably not going to care, because

you're being chased and you've gotta paint and there's freakin' CATS everywhere.

So. Drive and jump, jump and drive, collect oil cans and use them to spin out the police

presence. Hit a cat or - even more inexplicably - a bamboo shoot growing out of the street,

and you lose a life. Hit a car that isn't spinning in oil, and you explode all Mach

Rider-style, only for your various limbs and shrapnel and whatnot to re-form into hearts

and bounce around the screen to some lighthearted tune. Look, it's strange, but it's the 80s!

Everyone was just shocked by the fact you had detailed backgrounds of New York and London

and Paris... and then you collect three balloons and then all of a sudden you're warped all

the way out to the freakin' TAJ MAHAL in Agra.

City Connection could probably be coded in twelve minutes by any 15-year-old with a can

of Monster today, but it's still pretty darn fun and challenging. Your little Honda City

can turn on a dime, though you've got a second or two after such a maneuver where you're

limited in what you can do. Acceleration isn't an issue, as Elwood Blues has seemingly glued

your gas pedal down so you're maintaining a constant speed. The entire difficulty is

in the execution, then, as your every move is stymied by CATS FROM OUT OF NOWHERE. Still,

for a quick romp through your every mad road-painting fantasy, I can safely say that there's nothing

else out there that's going to scratch that particular, racing-slash-platforming itch.

That might be for the better, in truth.