CASA has a ‘real-time’ genre. If this is what I think it means and people have entered the genre correctly, you can do a search by genre and this reveals 83 games. First on the list is a French game Ça Va Peter Zorglub! that I translated to English so that I could contribute the French solution. In this game, you have 10 minutes in real time to finish the game, several instances of real-time input (indicated by a leading asterisk in my solution) and a 0.3 second window in which to enter the last command to successfully complete the game. Once I’d worked out how to solve the game, I must have played it 20 or 30 times to complete it successfully and ended up changing the BASIC source code to make it easier!
This isn’t exactly what you were talking about, but it’s a good example of the extreme frustration that results from this style of game. When you add guess-the-verb, lots of sudden death and a really stupid system of health points, I doubt too many people would have finished this game.
Oooh… that’s a useful little tag… Doesn’t seem to have been applied particularly consistently, though, as can often be the case. There seems to be at least a few games in there which are “per tick” rather than what I would consider real-time; and some where real-time is very much just limited to a few instances where a quick response is needed.
Thanks - that’s useful to know. I’ve spent quite a bit of time referring back to CASA as most vintage ZX Spectrum adventure games are, of course, completely intractable unless you happen to have infinity on your hands, but I hadn’t thought to search from that archive. The spectrumcomputing search is often a bit inconclusive.
Yes, the name/url of “solutionarchive” is a little bit of a misnomer… it’s a lot more than just solutions. A lot of effort is spent trying to ensure it documents text adventures, particular the eight bit scene, correctly. It’s a bit job, though. There are over 2,300 text adventures just for the ZX Spectrum.