Radar Ratrace

Way back in the 80’s you would be hard-pressed to find a video game with a plot. What passed for a plot in those days was usually no more than a line or two explaining some improbable situation, and if you were lucky you would get some instructions. Case in point: Radar Ratrace.

Radar Ratrace is a game of cat and mouse. You, a mouse, must navigate a maze and collect cheese while avoiding the cats. Get all the cheese, clear the maze. Touch a cat, lose a life. Utilize the ‘mouse holes’ in random corners of the maze to elude your pursuers. Oh, and the radar. You can only see the immediate area around you in glorious detail, but you can see the entire maze on a smaller mini-map. It’s a simple game with pretty good execution.

In searching for information about this game, I keep finding references to some kind of magic mouse dust that your character can litter the maze with to confuse the cats, making this an almost direct rip-off of the Namco arcade game Rally-X. For the life of me, I don’t remember that, and my TI is mothballed somewhere. We also had a copy of the game for the Commodore 64, and I don’t remember seeing it there, either. I suppose it’s not inconceivable that I didn’t know about some features. We never had any manuals or anything. But it’s tough for me to imagine that it didn’t occur to me to press the joystick button at some point. Of course, when I was playing it I was about nine years old. It was about that time I willingly slept in a closet for a couple of months.

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