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Rara Racer is brilliantDecember 24th, 2008 |
There are games about games. Then there’s games about gaming. And then games about how we live our lives. Rara Racer is one of those latter ones. I think. Astonishing considering it was developed in 48 hours for an indie games competition. Don’t be misled by the screenshot.
Ludum Dare » Blog Archive » Rara Racer – Finished.
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[...] And yeah, it took me a couple weeks to actually getting around to playing it. Downloading games is hard. But don’t trust me, trust Mr. Koster. [...]
I thought it was less of a critique of games and more of a critique of how little attention most people pay to things today. We’re surrounded by distractions, and it takes a good effort to focus for any length of time. Most people just don’t bother resisting, and it makes it much harder to enjoy things well.
[...] (Thanks to Raph Koster.) [...]
I loved the presentation, the creativity, and the humor of it. Plus it was pretty slick, with good sound.
But is this game-as-a-critique-of-games just masturbatory? I mean, the game itself wasn’t interesting, fresh, or fun, only the stuff larded on top. It’s not hard to make a pacman/asteroids/deathrace/moldy clone; everyone does it (including me).
If we want to turn the concept of games sideways, strange toys like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7obli6Vx-A
seem more relevant than 4th-wall-breaking stuff. To me, anyway.
Loved the IM popup. :p
Heh. What makes it great is that it subverts the very notion of game — not that it is great fun in its own right.
I might have missed something… I tried really hard to last the entire 2:10 without crashing, thinking there was some hidden bonus monologue but I was consistently stopped by the all-the-way-from-the-bottom-to-the-top wall of cones.
This reminded me of the time I was in intro to film, and I turned in a film about how bad the film I turned in was.
I’m curious though.. did I misunderstand? What makes this game great?