I am getting ready to work on a simple arcade-style game with "frantic multitasking" gameplay. By this, I mean games where the concept is relatively simple, but the difficulty comes from having to pay attention to a lot of different elements at once, keeping them all attended to at once. You lose when you forget to attend to something, because you were paying too much attention to something else. Some examples of this type of game would be the old arcade game Tapper (you can play it with MAME and download the rom from mame.dk to see what kind of game I''m talking about) or the Game & Watch Gallery games by Nintendo. So, do any of you know of any games like this, have any favorites, or have any suggestions for me? I''d like to look at more examples before I start working on my own. Thanks for your help. aleclair

The old classic Robotron / Smash TV is pretty damn frantic. Not quite multi-tasking, I dont think, but close nonetheless. You might want to adapt the idea to invlove more multi-taksing.

Hehehe, play any of the infinity engine games, and don''t use any kind of pausing ever...

Frantic multitasking games = every RPG with mulitple characters you could ''control'' in real time.

On a serious note, I found all of the C & C, starcraft etc type games to devolve into this at one point or another. Of course in those game you could still slow the action down to a crawl for the most part and get a handle on it.

Not quite ''multitasking'', but tetris et al. types of games tend to rely on an ever increasing rate of reaction, so you might be on to something. Bustamove etc, etc, etc.

You''d probably find a lot more games like this the further back in time you go. I can only think of one right now. Some sort of plate spinner game for the C64. You had I think 6 poles which you had to attend regularly to keep the plates from falling. While you had free time you could somehow flip another plate that wasn''t spinning and it would change colour. Different coloured plates had different point values or something. I don''t remember how exactly the game worked but I remember playing it for several hours.

The number one game of this type is air traffic control. Easy to control a single plane and turn it at the right moments; a bit harder with eight.

But... but that''s what HITLER would say!!