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Originally Posted by stepurhan
I'd be interested to know what games you had that happen in. The only text adventure I've come across that operated in real-time (i.e. time passed even when you didn't type anything) was Border Zone from Infocom. Otherwise timed puzzles in text adventures seemed to be of the "you have x numbers of moves to solve this or die" type.
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I am thinking specifically of 'West' and 'Zkul' for the Sinclair QL, both written by the same bloke. Some guy recently wrapped them in an emulator and released them as a package for the PC,
if you're interested in checking them out.
Both of these games were 'real-time' in a general sense, in that time would pass independent of how many 'moves' you had taken. Zkul featured 'hunger' and 'thirst', which was seriously annoying. West featured "ill-tempered bank robbers" roaming the countryside, and if you couldn't type "shoot robber" fast enough you were dead. Not really a puzzle, that one...
The particular puzzle I was thinking about in my original moan, where text scrolled away faster than it could be read, was from Zkul...
Spoiler:A large room, where taking a necessary 'treasure hunt' object from the centre would trigger the walls closing in. Cue several paragraphs of description, with more appearing at intervals. This scrolled the existing text, making it very hard to focus on, and I don't think I ever managed to read it all before it was scrolled away by the 'You are dead!' messages. Very annoying.
It was doubly annoying because I think I had the answer - but of course, making the parser understand in a limited time was a whole other matter...
Good games though. I'll complete them some day.
