Flip-screen Computer Role-playing Games

A flip-screen cRPG is a computer role-playing game that updates a first-person perspective drawspace in real-time as the player moves forwards, backwards, left and right or turns left and right. The player moves about in tile-based increments and turns around in 90° step-increments; that is, there is usually no seamless three-dimensional or pseudo-3D screen-updating (rendering) of the world; the objects and actors scale depending on their proximity to the player. In addition, each character in the party usually moves as one bloc (not a misspelling), though with separate attacks.

Flip-screen cRPGs are so-named because players "flip through" a series of pre-drawn drawspaces by moving and turning their character or party. The drawspaces are linked together to form the chambers and corridors that constitute maze-like dungeons. Flip-screen cRPGs are almost invariably dungeon crawlers. However, "dungeon crawler" is too broad a term since isometric cRPGs can also be focused on dungeon-crawling.

Flip-screen cRPGs feature contiguous exploration of an environment; that is, as the player moves their party about a map of the environment is formed in the mind.

In flip-screen cRPGs the party is controlled via arrow-keys, numeric keypad or, if using a mouse, via an icon cluster.

Captive of 1990 is the best flip-screen cRPG ever made:

In flip-screen cRPGs the mouse-cursor is seamlessly moved between the icon cluster and the active drawspace. In the drawspace, interactable objects are manipulated with mouse-clicks and mouse-movements. For example, doors are opened and closed, keys are inserted into locks, switches are toggled, torches are removed from and placed back in torch-brackets, and items are picked up and put down.

An item that has been clicked on in the drawspace auto-attaches itself to the mouse-cursor and can be placed into the inventory with another click, and vice versa.

As a rule, flip-screen cRPGs are easy to get into due to their intuitive interfaces and logical drawspace presentation, but they are usually not as easy to beat due to their maze-like dungeons that are packed with puzzles, traps and monsters.

Flip-screen cRPGs were popular on Atari ST, Amiga and IBM PC. It was the native hardware mouse-cursor and icon-presentation capabilities of the ST/Amiga that ushered in what become the modern flip-screen cRPG with the advent of Dungeon Master of 1987.

Chronological List of Flip-screen cRPGs

This is a chronological list of flip-screen cRPGs with on-screen colors and active first-person drawspace size appended. This shows how pathetically small the Gold Box drawspace was for half a decade.