While frozen bubble is a great game, I don't think it reads clearly at all. Rather than use standard modules, the authors of frozen bubble had to (if you read the code) create their own framebuffer manipulation code, to work around the lack of primatives in SDL, etc. This is not a crack against Perl or FB, just to say that it is not clean. I would have much rather seen the FrozenBubble developers contribute back to the SDL project with lots of CPAN modules than hand-roll the solution they've hand rolled. Now, in order to get good clean SDL, most folks read frozen-bubble, but I argue that shouldn't be neccessary!

As to answering the OP's question, definitely realtime is out for 98% of the languages out there -- and 98% of the operating systems!

Perl *can* invade the GUI space (either through wxWindows, Perl-GTK, or even my favorite Perl/Tk) and the games space, it's been done, but these are only areas that require severe discipline to make Perl OO work. I'm considering one such project right now.

Below someone posts a failed Quake2 mods project. Well, just to throw a wrench in the socket, I know of a University project doing some excellent work using Lisp to control Unreal AI's and mod's. Yes, folks, Lisp. Anything can be done here, if anything, there may be performance conerns (which happens in anything but C/C++ for the most part for things like that) or the developers bit off more than they could chew for the first iteration. If it can be done in Lisp, it can be done!