You Can't Get Ye Flask: Difference between revisions
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{{quote|''"Dammit! So let's recap: there are four directions that I can move in and none of them work. What the fuck am I supposed to do?"''|'''[http://www.sydlexia.com/mysteryhouse.htm SydLexia]''', reviewing [[wikipedia:Mystery House|Mystery House]]}}
An annoying aspect of oldschool [[Text Parser]]-based [[Adventure Game
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.]]
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Another option is to give a list of all the possible words. One small game, used to demonstrate features of the C programming language, listed its 6 verbs and 12 nouns in the help screen. Chris Crawford's ''Storytron'' engine has you choose each variable part of the sentence from a drop-down list, and then adds or replaces the next part of the sentence as appropriate.
Examples of games with actual ''good'' parsers include ''[[The Hobbit]]'', and anything by [[Infocom]] and Legend. Ironically, that includes some of the ''oldest'' adventure games; many of the newer ones tried to reinvent the parser wheel. The TADS (Text Adventure Development System) runtime is particularly good at such
Sometimes called "Guess The Verb" or "Guess The Syntax". The "ye" comes from [[Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe]]. The equivalent frustration in non-parser [[Point and Click]] games is the [[Pixel Hunt]]. Contrast [[The Dev Team Thinks of Everything]], if you are working with an exceptionally good text parser.
{{examples}}
== Video game examples
=== [[Adventure Game]] ===
* ''[http://www.platypuscomix.net/applepalooza/deathmaze.html Deathmaze 5000]'', for the [[TRS-80]] and [[Apple II]], contained (among other things) a pit in the first level containing an item you needed to complete the game. Once you stepped on it you were stuck in one place, and your only clue was "To everything there is a season." In case you didn't pick up on the clue, it would shout "To everything, TURN TURN TURN" after a few minutes. Typing in "Turn" did nothing. Physically turning by hitting the move keys did nothing. None of the items you got on that level were "turnable". The only way to know what to do was if you bought the Deathmaze 5000 Hint Sheet from the software company in the early 80's (and whoever you are, you don't have it).
** 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.)
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** As part of its copy protection, ''[[King's Quest III]]'' included several spells the player needed to cast. Rather than an easily-copied phrase, each spell consisted of several steps requiring advance preparation. Unfortunately, several of those steps required a specific verb or the entire process would fail.
** In the first ''[[Space Quest]]'' game you have to INSERT the keycard. No synonymous or rephrasing of that unusual and unnecessarily technical term will be accepted.
** Parodied in ''[[Quest for Glory 2]]'' with the lamp, where if you type "put down lamp" your character starts insulting the lamp. However, he does still do the same thing he would have done if you'd typed "[[Use Item|use lamp]]".
** ''[[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.
* On a game based on the Spanish comic books "[[Zipi y Zape]]", apparently you had to [[It Makes Sense in Context|drop a nail so that your father sits on it and wounds himself with it and drops a patch]]. The thing is, people tried lots of variations of "drop nail" or "put nail near father" without any progress. It took SEVENTEEN years until someone with programming knowledge hacked the game files and found out that the exact code had to be "throw nail under tree". As if nails had to be thrown, or anything could be put under trees. Let's all play nail throw! You can find the whole thing explained, if you can read Spanish, in [http://lineadura.wordpress.com/2006/03/01/derribando-el-mito-%c2%bfquien-mato-a-la-aventura-conversacional here.].
* While ''[[Onna no Ko to Misshitsu ni Itara ○○shichau Kamoshirenai]]'' recognizes a very diverse array of irrelevant words that serve no purpose but to sexually harass the heroines the incorporeal protagonist is helping, all with unique responses ''per level'' (sometimes even having different responses within that level) <ref>Among them むね (breasts), スカート (skirt), パンツ (underwear), ケツ (ass), もも (thighs) and こいびと ((do you have a) boyfriend/lover).</ref>, several progression critical entries are oddly specific. For example to tell the heroine to grab an American Football, one ''must'' type ラグビーボール (Rugby Ball), even though no other balls are present in this level, the game recognizes ball on its own in every other level, and the game is fully capable of handling synonyms. Likewise setting a clock to 9 ''must'' use "9じ" (9 o clock), even though number only prompts are widely used for number locks.
=== [[Interactive Fiction]] ===
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** The game ''Asylum'' knew those words... use them once and you get a warning, use them again and it boots you from the game!
*** And this was after he sooner found a way to eat his pillow than he did find a way out of the room he was in.
* ''Bureaucracy'' uses this as a game mechanic: you get penalized for inputting an incorrect command, by an increase in "blood pressure". If blood pressure becomes dangerously high, your character dies.
* The otherwise excellent ''Curses'' by Graham Nelson had a section where you had to cram a voice-operated robot mouse into a mouse hole and then give it instructions - only the standard commanding language explained in the instructions ("mouse, go north") didn't work. Trying every verb on every object randomly might bring you to the correct solution: you have to address the hole, not the mouse ("hole, go north"). It also freaked out completely if you just gave it the following simple command:
{{quote|{{smallcaps|>dance}}
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{{quote|''"Jump"
Very good. Now you can go to the second grade.'' }}
** All things considered, the [[Zork]] parser is pretty forgiving. It allowed for articles and for multipart commands ("pick up the box and put it on the table") and had a pretty big vocabulary.
* 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.
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{{quote|Congratulations, you have killed the dragon with your bare hands! (Unbelievable, isn't it?)}}
* The [[Edutainment Game]] ''Voices of Spoon River'' several times explicitly tells the player to "place" something on something else... but the verb "place" isn't implemented. It's not too hard to figure out that you have to "put" instead, but it's still weird.
* ''Ad Verbum'' makes an art of
* "The Six Foot Tall Man Eating Chicken" has a pretty big one. There is a cork. There is a bucket with a hole in it. Putting the two together? Plug doesn't work. Use doesn't work... {{spoiler|Solution is PUT. Which is never mentioned}}
* ''[[The Very Big Cave Adventure]]'' responds to any use of "take" or "put" with "Try 'get' or 'drop'". Which is fine, until you want to stop carrying the bomb...
** One of its stock responses when it can't parse a command is "Sorry, this thick computer doesn't understand that."
=== [[Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game|MMORPG]]s ===
* Parodied in the screenshots of [
* ''[[
** 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".
* There is a part in ''[[Kingdom of Loathing]]'' known as the Leaflet Quest that is a [[Shout-Out]] to the ''[[Zork]]'' games. Since it's not too large, a ''lot'' of detail was put into putting smart-aleck responses to random commands not facilitated by the usual [[Infocom]] queue. For example:
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=== [[Survival Horror]] ===
* ''[[
== Non-video game examples
=== Film ===
* [[Phelous]] points out that the website in
=== Literature ===
* In the novel ''[[God Game (novel)|God Game]]'' by [[Andrew Greeley]], the natural language parser for the game interface that the narrator uses to do anything more than speak directly to the characters in the game is amazingly sophisticated for 1986 -- but is still prone to this trope at the most frustrating moments. (And sometimes it seems to do it [[It Amused Me|just to annoy the narrator]].)
=== [[Web Animation]] ===
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=== [[Web Comics]] ===
* This (along with other early [[Adventure Game]] tropes, especially their tendency to be [[Nintendo Hard]]) is played with in ''[[Dinosaur Comics]]''. [
{{quote|
* 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]]''.
** [[Jail Break|What]] [[Running Gag|pumpkin]]?
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