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By N2H
Welcome to Raph Koster's personal website: MMOs, gaming, writing, art, music, books.

Rara Racer is brilliant

December 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.

May your days be merry and bright!

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7 Responses to “Rara Racer is brilliant”

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Trackbacks & Pingbacks
  1. goviolet » this modern life wrote on

    [...] (Thanks to Raph Koster.) [...]

  2. Independent Creator » Blog Archive » Rara Racer wrote on

    [...] 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. [...]

Reader Comments
  1. Bret said on

    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?

  2. Raph said on

    Heh. What makes it great is that it subverts the very notion of game — not that it is great fun in its own right.

  3. Michael Chui said on

    Loved the IM popup. :p

  4. Thom Robertson said on

    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.

  5. Henk said on

    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.

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