City Connection

In City Connection, the player controls Clarice, a blue-haired teen driving an orange Honda City hatchback, as she travels around the world in the quest of finding herself the perfect man. Clarice traverses through twelve side-scrolling stages that take place within famous locations around the world, including New York, London, and Japan. To clear these levels, the player must drive over each of the elevated highways to change their color from white to green. The car can jump over large gaps to reach higher sections of the stage.

Clarice is constantly being pursued by police cars that follow her around the stage, and must also avoid flag-waving cats that block her from moving past them. Clarice can collect and launch oil cans at police cars and traffic vehicles to temporarily stun them; ramming into them while stunned will knock them off the stage. Cats are invulnerable to oil cans, and cannot be killed by any means. If the player remains on the same stage for an extended period of time, spikes extrude from the ground and instantly kills them. On occasion, a red-colored balloon may appear in the stage, and collecting three of these warps the player to a new area and grants them bonus points.

City Connection was developed by Jaleco and released in Japanese arcades in July 1985. In North America, the game was licensed to Kitkorp and published as Cruisin'. Many of the game's stages feature an arrangement of "Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1".

The song used when Clarice hits one of the flag-waving cats is "Der Flohwalzer", known in Japan as "Neko Funjatta" (lit. "I Stepped on the Cat"), while another stage features a remix of the song "Highway Star" by Deep Purple. City Connection is credited as being one of the first to use new music tracks for each stage as opposed to recycling one song. The car the player controls throughout the game is a Honda City hatchback, which is believed to be the source for the game's title.

City Connection has maintained a loyal following in Japan, where it became one of Jaleco's most successful and beloved games. The NES version, in particular, is viewed as a classic title on the system for its accurate portrayal of the arcade original. In 2003, Yuge listed it as being among the console's greatest games, through its unique gameplay, colorful visuals, and memorable soundtrack. The magazine staff described it as being a game that fulfills the dreams of children who want to play arcade games.

The NES version and its digital re-releases received mixed reviews in North America, by comparison. Critics focused largely on its overall simplicity and poor controls. A reviewer for Computer Entertainment US felt that the game was hindered by its lack of replay value for older players. IGN and Nintendo Life reviewers Lucas M.

Clarice is credited as being among the first female protagonists in a console game. She appears as a playable character in the PlayStation game GUNbare! Game Tengoku (1998), misspelled as "Claris" and bearing little resemblance to her original design, and in the high-definition remaster The Game Paradise Crusin' Mix (2018) as downloadable content.

In 2004, Jaleco released a sequel named City Connection Rocket for Japanese mobile phones through i-Mode. The game places Clarice in the role of a spy working for a secret organization to capture criminal leaders from around the world. Rather than painting sections of road, Clarice must now collect briefcases placed in specific areas in each stage while avoiding police cars and other types of enemies. Rocket was bundled with City Connection DX for a 2015 re-release on the PlayStation Vita under Hamster's Appli-Archives series, which was available through the PlayStation Mobile service. PlayStation Mobile closed in September 2015, delisting the game from the PlayStation Store and other supported devices.