You Can't Get Ye Flask: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

 

For example, let's say the command to look at a monster was "look monster". If you typed in "look at monster", the game might say something like "I don't know how to do that" or "I don't see an 'at' here". This got better over time, but never completely disappeared before command-line interfaces went out of style. Still, the text parser remained a staff favorite, as it allowed them to anticipate what the player might type in a given situation. Should the player's input be totally off-the-wall (such as 'pick nose'), [[The Dev Team Thinks of Everything|they would create a suitably off-the-wall response.]]

 

 

{{quote| '''Strong Bad''': And you'd be all like "get ye flask", and it'd say "[[Trope Namer|You can't get ye flask]]", and you'd just have to sit there and imagine why on Earth you can't get ye flask! Because the game's certainly not going to tell you.}}

 

== [[Adventure Game]] ==

** The item in the pit was a calculator that displayed 317. If you cleaned it, it displayed 317.2. Typing "HELP" at this point gives the cryptic instructions "Invert & telephone." The player had to think of turning an old-fashioned square-digit calculator display of 317.2 upside-down, which would resemble "2LIE", and then look at the buttons or dial on a telephone to turn this into "2543". This leads to the actual solution, [http://www.swobi.at/asylum/dm_hints.html shown on the hint sheet:] turn right 2 times, then left five times, then right four times, then left three times.

** At one point in the game, you have to ''fart''. Yeah. You just type "fart." There are no hints that this would do anything useful, naturally. (Although if you'd experimented with typing "fart" earlier, you'd have been rewarded with being propelled down the hallway on a jet of your own exhaust.)

* 8-bit adventure ''Heroes of Karn'' required you to extinguish some smouldering ashes with the water you were carrying. None of PUT WATER ON, DROP WATER ON, POUR WATER ON, USE WATER WITH, QUENCH, DOUSE, EXTINGUISH, COOL, DAMPEN, MOISTEN, SOAK, DRENCH, FLOOD, WET or IMMERSE ASHES would work. Figuring out you had to "WATER ASHES" was by far the hardest part of that game.

{{quote| ->open bolt<br />

Please say "undo bolt". }}

* In many adventure games, the player was safe with the generic verb "[[Use Item]]" applied to any object or situation. Some games, however, would not make that leap. Especially frustrating when you're given an item and you're not sure what it is and ''how'' you're supposed to use it, such as being given a crank in ''[[Laura Bow]] 1'' which you're not sure what to do with. "How do you want to use the crank, Laura?" ''Aaaaarrrrgghhhh!!!''

* As pointed out by Syd Lexia, in the very first [[Sierra]] game, ''Mystery House'', the game will accept PRESS BUTTON, but not PUSH BUTTON.

** This one isn't actually Al Lowe's (creator/programmer) fault. There was an unrelated bug that needed fixing, so Lowe, pressed for time, had someone else fix it. He assured him everything was fine, and the code seemed to check out. The only problem? The programmer changed "bag" from a noun to a verb. Lowe never noticed, as the policy for testing was to use the longest sentence possible, which bypassed the error. More info can be found on [http://www.allowe.com/Larry/cluescheats.htm#Larry2 Lowe's site.]

** In ''[[King's Quest]]'', most locked doors can be unlocked by a variety of phrases, such as "open door with key", "put key in key hole", "use key to open door", etc. Except for the magical door in ''[[King's Quest II]]'', which only accepted "unlock door".

** ''[[Quest for Glory I]]'' allowed one to type "Pick Nose" (mentioned in the description), which would allow a thief to train his lock picking skills (and get a message saying "Success! Your nose is now opened!). Having too low a skill would cause one to [[The Many Deaths of You|jam the lockpick up one's nose into their brain and die]]. The really funny bit is that later games (and remakes) kept this [[Easter Egg]] (sans the dying part) even when the series abandoned the text parser. The game would then play the "door unlocking" sound, and simply display "success", meaning that players who had not played the original and clicked on themselves with the lockpicks by accident were rather confused as to what just happened.

* Among the many frustrating puzzles in ''[[Starship Titanic]]'' is obtaining one of Titania's (the ship's AI) broken eyes. It's one of four similar-looking globes (the others are lightbulbs). You can't just reach out and grab it, even though you can poke it and the game will tell you what it is. You have to summon the Bellbot, hold your cursor over the correct one and type: "Get the broken eye". "Get the eye", "Hand me the eye", "Give me Titania's eye", or "Give the eye to me" will not work. Worse, "Get the broken bulb" also works.

 

== [[Interactive Fiction]] ==

* Scott Adams' 1978 ''Adventureland'' required the player to enter the unintuitive UNLIGHT LAMP in order to prevent a lamp from using up its fuel, and would not recognise the verb EXTINGUISH (and certainly not the phrases PUT OUT or TURN OFF).

{{quote| "Okay, so I went north? What'd that do?"<br />

{{smallcaps|>go east}}<br />

* The ''[[Fahrenheit 451]]'' text adventure was a nasty example. [[The Many Deaths of You|You could be killed for something as simple as crossing the street at the wrong times of day]], [[Luck-Based Mission|there were several times you had to fight off a Hound or Fireman...and the result was based on if the computer felt charitable]], and you advanced the plot contact members of the [[La Résistance|Underground]] using literary quotations as pass-phrases. However, the parser system was pretty craptastic, and if you so much as left out a punctuation mark, then you lost your chance to use the phrase, and had to leave the building and come back to try again. Worse, it had plenty of [[Guess the Verb]] moments as "Talk to man" worked sometimes, while others you had to use "Ask Man" with no indication as to what. Top it all off with a [[Downer Ending]] with a side order of [[Fridge Logic]] if you managed to put up with the game's quirks long enough to reach a conclusion.

* Satirized in ''Guess the Verb'', an IF game containing several scenarios, each revolving around an uncommon verb.

** If you never input a senseless command, the game will eventually take a certain correct command (I forget what it is, but it's one you need to complete the game) and use that as the deadly insult. You get kudos for timing it right and saying the actual quote ({{spoiler|"I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle"}}).

** One PC magazine described this kind of thing as "toying with various ways of saying PUT BABEL FISH UP ZAPHOD'S JACKSIE".

* The ''[[The Spellcasting Series|Spellcasting 101]]'' series was both an example of and aversion of this trope. On the one hand, you had to use specific verbs for many situations , but all of the verbs in the game (as well as your entire inventory) is displayed in a menu on the left side of the screen, allowing the entire game to be played with the mouse. (Picking up items required clicking on a picture field.)

* Infocom's SHOGUN, based on the novel by [[James Clavell]], involves the protagonist in trying to communicate with the Japanese by searching for a common language. However, one can not actually input lines in any of the foreign languages he knows... and trying to type anything like "Say 'where am I' in Spanish" crashed the parser.

{{quote| ''It is dark in here. You may be eaten by a grue.<br />

"Hello, grue."<br />

{{quote| ''"Jump"<br />

Very good. Now you can go to the second grade.'' }}

 

* The foulest, evilest, most likely-to-drive-the-player-mad game was by far Murder in the Museum found on the ''[[Big Blue Disk]]''. It deliberately invoked this trope and required players to guess the NOUNS. What was described as "a leg bone" could only be obtained by typing "Get FEMUR", a "small gun" was "DERRINGER" and on, and on. There were no hints as to what you were actually supposed to call an object to pick it up, The text parser was more pedantic than sierra's, and if you weren't fast with the pencil the game would actually delete the text of the piece of dissolving spy paper from the screen, thereby causing you to lose a critical and random code which would make the game unwinnable. Not that it was possible to figure out what was in the space probe and thereby even progress with the game.

** Somewhat related to this trope: you needed to activate the chat text field to talk to NPCs, otherwise, pressing letters on the keyboard would result in activating hotkeys for game commands. Standard fare, sure, but then you take into account that the default key for "Attack" was 'a' and it was possible to attack friendly NPCs. Forgetting to press Enter before typing could be lethal as you'd get three letters into "What" before the NPC flattened you for what seemed like no reason.

* In one storyline mission in ''[[Forum Warz]]'' you have to complete a text adventure game and tell the character who gave you the mission how you did it. In the mission ending conversation, you tell him you have to enter the command "push button", not "press button"... but while playing the text adventure itself, you can complete that section with the command "use button".

** An incorrect "throw" command yields: "Your request to throw something, presumably at something else, made no sense to me. Perhaps you're trying to throw an item you don't have, or throw an item at a target that doesn't exist, or perhaps those objects simply aren't intended to interact in that way. For more information on the proper throwing of objects, send your name and address to "Throwing: A Guide For Beginners", Pueblo, Colorado, 80019."

** Trying to go up when you can't yields: "Up? Isn't this maze annoying enough for you with just the four directions? I suppose next you'll want to go north-by-north-east."

 

== [[Survival Horror]] ==

 

=== Non-video game examples: ===

 

== [[Web Animation]] ==

 

== [[Web Comics]] ==

{{quote| {{smallcaps|get up}}<br />

== I don't see "up" here == }}

* At one point the cast of the webcomic ''[[Okashina Okashi]]'' gets trapped in an alternate dimension based on these games. It was a dark void where the girls had to shout out commands based on the old text adventure games. Bad parsing jokes abounded, shouting "WHY can't I get ye flask!" and crying.

* Taken [[Up to Eleven]] with ''[[Problem Sleuth]]''.

** However, you can get ye flask. In a published edition, [[Word of God]] says that he didn't know the reference at the time.

* [http://www.thenoobcomic.com/index.php?pos=199 This] page of [[The Noob]].

== [[Web Original]] ==

* [[Cracked]] has "[http://www.cracked.com/blog/revisiting-old-school-text-adventures-as-a-jaded-modern-gamer/ Revisiting Old School Text Adventures as a Jaded Modern Gamer.]" It has the AI reacting with shocked horror to the insane player's sadistic commands, and eventually feeds him to a swarm of [[Naughty Tentacles]] monsters out of spite.

 

== [[Real Life]] ==