A nice review of Loop Raccord appeared on Play This Thing!:
Type: Free Download Developer: Nicolai Troshinsky Game’s Page Download (PC)A 2011 IGF Nuovo Award nominee, Loop Raccord was originaly developed for a Experimental Gameplay contest with the theme “neverending”.
The black screen is tiled into anywhere between three and twelve video panes. In each pane, a short clip of public domain video plays. One pane is your focus initially. You may pause, reverse, and advance through the video in that pane one frame at a time, and restart when you wish. Your objective is to start it, from the right frame, at the right moment so that motion from an adjoining pane “flows” somehow into your pane in a naturalistic fashion. In other words, there’s some motion in that pane that moves toward the edge of your pane at a place where motion in your clip begins at some point, even though the clips are entirely different from one another, and you want the motion to seem to move smoothly from one pane to the next. If you succeed, the game rewards you with text and points, and moves onto another pane — you don’t control which pane is editable, the game does.
To complete the level, you arrange all panes so that motion is continuous across them. I haven’t played the full game, so I’m not sure how many levels there are, but there seem to be quite a few.
It’s certainly a novel design, and its interesting that the game is as much fun as it is, given than ‘splicing video’ is a pretty unlikely theme for any game. It also has a somewhat frustrating “guess the designer’s intention” element, similar to that of many adventure games, since it isn’t always entirely apparent exactly how or why the designer wishes motion to flow between two panes in a particular case, and of course the “correct” match is specified by the designer.
And of course, in general, use of linear video in a game is otiose; here, it’s used cleverly.
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