It looks like a driving game from the cart but nope, it's a platform game. You control a little Honda City Car that appears to have no brakes: it is always moving. No doubt, after taking it the garage and had the mechanic exhale and quote you silly prices for fixing it “Ooof you can’t get the parts easily for these Japanese micro cars, mate”, you decided to keep driving it anyway. It’ll sort itself out right?
The old jalopy always tootles along at the same speed; the controls you have over it are left and right turns, a Dukes of Hazzard style handbrake turn and a normal or high jump. I wish every car manufacturer had followed Honda’s lead on that feature.
The idea of the game is paint every bit of the road. You do this simply by driving over it. Like one of those line-painting machines you see old blokes using on football fields presumably. These City Cars truly are amazing, like Swiss army knives.
Of course, nothing is ever simple and The Daily Mail would be very happy as the police have a zero-tolerance for such free thinking expression and will attempt to stop you mid brush stroke. Crash into them and you explode into fluttery hearts like a Michael Bay blockbuster meets the Care Bears. However, you can fight back against John Q Law by bounding over them or firing cans of oil at them. You can collect more of this fossil fuel on your travels.
The other enemy is a cat, well of course it is. This mangy moggy also causes the loss of a life on colliding with it. Occasionally, a balloon may float by. If you touch it you collect it. God knows where, your car is clearly the TARDIS. Grab three of them and you get sent to a warp that sends you a couple of stages ahead, and gives you some good old bonus points to boot.
I was really looking forward to playing this one as many years ago when I owned a Commodore Amiga I had a game by Core Design called CarVuP, which I loved to death and it was based on the arcade original of this.
As is the case with many old Famicom carts, it took me five minutes of cleaning, swearing and pleading until it decided to work. However, first impressions seemed positive, the graphics are nice, with a nice New York Skyline with Lady Liberty and the poor old Twin Towers on the first stage. There is a nice little tinkly tune too, all good stuff.
It wasn’t to last though. Your Honda is a bit of a handful to control, the jumping is fiddly at the best of times and it’s not helped by occasionally poor responses from the controls. Plus in the Amiga’s CarVuP, when you reached the edge of a platform the car would automatically flip round, which was a real help in painting the last segment of the platform and setting off again. Here your car just keeps on going, which means you very often fall into the unknown and out of control.
The lush backgrounds, whilst nice, actually hinder the game. The fine detail makes the baddies hard to spot and the parallax scrolling makes the whole experience a bit confusing, especially on the second level where it’s hard in tense moments to quickly work out where the platforms are.
After several plays you get used to all of this somewhat and there is an enjoyable game to be had with perseverance. But it still feels unnecessarily fiddly and unfair. It’s entertaining but sadly flawed.
