 The Super Nintendo features racing games with cool futuristic cars driving hundreds of kilometers an hour like F-Zero and Top Gear 3000, and racing games with vehicles armed to the teeth with missiles and lasers like biker mice from Mars and rock and roll racing. So with all that territory staked out already, developer Vary decided, hey, let's make a racing game where you race with K cars? Yeah, that's right, nuts to all that cool futuristic stuff for any of that crazy combat racing. Hey, I had a K car way back in the day, a 1985 Plymouth Reliant, and it only took a full 30 seconds to go from 0 to 60, which usually meant I was only going about 35 miles an hour by the time I merged onto a highway. I mean, come on, who doesn't love the thrill that comes with the throaty roar of a K car? In case you're not familiar, a K car pretty much refers to a car that's specifically made for efficiency over performance, in other words, a grocery getter. And yeah, sure enough, Kat's Run Zen Nippon K cars Senchuken features 10 different racers and 10 different cars, and each car is taken from a real-life example, like the Honda Today, the AutoZam AZ-1, and the Suzuki Jimny, and they all, you know, look like this. Each car is rated in five categories. Top speed, acceleration and handling are all self-explanatory, body dictates how it handles when bumping into other cars, and dirt is how the car performs off-road. What's interesting is that instead of racing in a circuit or a series of races, all the tracks, settings, and environments are all linked together as one long race, kind of like Outrun. The end of an area is triggered when you come across a red ball, at which point the screen goes black, and the track reappears with a brand new setting with new obstacles and hazards. This transition here works in different ways depending on which game mode you choose. If you pick Street Path, that links all 10 tracks together as one long race, so you just move from one area to the other. But if you pick the Split Path mode, then there's only five tracks linked together with the leader of the race being able to choose which path to take, either left or right, keeping things slightly more unpredictable. That's run plays like a cross between a kart racer and an arcade racer. The steering will feel very familiar to anyone that's played a ton of Super Mario Kart, and the drifting is similar too, but the structure is closer to an arcade racer. There's also items you can pick up, mostly weapons like a bag of spikes, a teddy bear, an oil drum, and a shoe. They mostly work like the green shell in Mario Kart in that they only go in a straight line directly in front of you, so yeah, it can be hard to hit other cars. The only other item you can pick up that's not a weapon is a Nitro Boost, and those are hugely important here as you might expect, just wait for a brief straightaway and let her rip. That brings me to what's maybe the game's biggest flaw. This game is kinda easy, and as a result, it's kinda boring. At least with a caveat I'll get to in a little bit. Sure this game has charm and spades, you gotta love the expressive character portrait for each character right there in the bottom of the screen. I admit sometimes I get stuck watching the reactions instead of watching the road. But once you get into first place, it seems like nobody ever overtakes you, and it's really easy to just coast to the finish. There are different difficulty levels you can change in the options menu, but they don't make much of a difference. Also the game's marathon structure means there's no on-screen map, and I know that can be a bummer for some people as well. So if you win the race, then you have a one-on-one race versus the final boss, and she is freaking impossible to beat. She's like a thousand times faster, takes on turns much quicker than you, and yeah, no chance in hell. The thing is, once you get your face beaten in on this race, you gotta start over all the way back at the beginning. That's not that big of a deal, since even the street race takes something like 15 minutes to complete, but it's just a bummer that you don't get another crack at the boss right then and there. If you do manage to beat the boss, you unlock her as a playable character, as well as a police woman, and more notably her police car, which is fast as hell. I should mention real quick that in street mode, if you lag behind at all, a police car can chase you down, and if she catches you, it's game over right then and there. The only other mode this game has is a two-player split-screen mode that gives you four tracks to choose from that are four laps each, but yeah, other than that, there's really not much going on in this game. I guess it is a racing game, so you really can't expect that much, but still, it would have been nice to have just a little more. I will say the music does its part here. It's a fantastic soundtrack, and to me, that's always been really important in a racing game since it adds so much to the experience. So yeah, Cat's Run is a decent racing game, and what I find interesting is that this game got pretty bad reviews in Japan when it was first released in 1995. That's pretty late in the Super Nintendo lifespan, so I'm sure this game was completely glossed over while stuff like Chrono Trigger and Lufia 2 was blowing the doors off the system. The thing is, though, this is a perfectly decent racing game, and it's a fun time with a second player if you're into games like this. I do like the marathon structure here because I dig the music so much. It's just that this game is so short. There's really not much else here. At the very least, you can try this game out using the BSNES HD Mode 7 emulator, like I am here to make the game look really cool. I just love how this looks. Yeah, it's not perfect, but it's still really friggin' nice to be able to see everything like this without it being stretched out. But yeah, if you're into racing games like this, or if you're just a major K-Car enthusiast, then Cat's Run is a good playthrough. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.