You Can't Get Ye Flask: Difference between revisions

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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]]".

** 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.

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* Parodied in the screenshots of [http://www.cityofheroes.com/news/news_archive/ncnorcal_announces_city_of_her.html this] ''[[City of Heroes]]'' ([[April Fools' Day]]) announcement.

* ''[[EverQuest]]'' tends to suffer from this trope. When talking to [[NPC]]s you will find [certain words] in brackets, indicating they have more to say on the subject; you need to type those words into the chat log in order to continue down that line of conversation. [However, there is a catch]" "What, however there is a catch?" "Sometimes it's not quite as simple as just typing the words again, and you need to put it in the form of a question; most commonly by adding ''what'' to the words in brackets with blatant disregard for syntax." "What about the catch?" usually worked too, and was more syntactically correct most of the time. And usually something that actually did make sense was accepted, if you guessed the right version of it. [Sometimes, there was another catch.] In this variation of the catch, only the syntactically correct response worked (in this case, "What was the other catch?"). The game was annoyingly inconsistent.

*** And sometimes, the developers made it obvious they were just being mean. For example trying to ask Bootstrutter about "jboots" earns a response something like "What nonsense is this about jboots? Speak to me of Journeyman's Boots!"

** And sometimes, the developers made it obvious they were just being mean. For example trying to ask Bootstrutter about "jboots" earns a response something like "What nonsense is this about jboots? Speak to me of Journeyman's Boots!"

** 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".

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== Non-video game examples ==

=== Film ===

* [[Phelous]] points out that the website in ~~Fear Dot Com~~ seems to run on this sort of interface.

* [[Phelous]] points out that the website in ''[[FeardotCom]]'' seems to run on this sort of interface.

== 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]] ===