You Can't Get Ye Flask: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

[[File:flask.jpg|link=Homestar Runner|frame|"And there's no precious graphics to help, either."]]

 

{{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]]}}

 

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.

 

* ''[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.

* 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.].

 

* 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).

* [[The Angry Video Game Nerd]] provides the following example of a flawed parser interface in his attempt to play ''The Count'' on the Vic-20:

"Oh, okay, I'll give you two words!"

{{smallcaps|>fuck you}}

** 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.

{{quote|{{smallcaps|>dance}}

{{smallcaps|(with yourself)}}

* 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.

* "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}}

 

* 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.

* ''[[Ever Quest]]'' tends to suffer from this trope. When talking to [[NPC|NPCs]] 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.

*** Again, probably less a case of technical pedantry and more a case of programming difficulty ("use" could, theoretically, be a synonym for almost ''every other verb'' in the game; making it such would mean there's little point in even bothering with verbs at all).

 

* ''[[Operators Side|LifeLine]]'' on the [[PlayStation 2]] plays similarly to a text adventure, albeit one controlled by the player's voice than with a keyboard. Aside from the [[Fake Difficulty|joys of iffy voice recognition]] causing much frustration and the genre standard [[Guess the Verb|Guess the Noun]] portions, there are several instances in which very specific phrases must be used to get the proper effect. [[Collection Sidequest|One chip]] is particularly difficult to acquire, merely for the fact that said chip was located behind a bag of some sort, and telling Rio to "check behind bag" didn't work for some reason.

 

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

 

* ''[[Homestar Runner]]'': In addition to the [[Trope Namer]] example, this became a running joke, appearing in the [[Homestar Runner]] online game ([[Load-Bearing Boss|as the dungeon caves in on you]]), and appearing as a point-garnering command in ''Thy Dungeonman 2''. In ''Thy Dungeonman 3'', getting ye flask becomes the object of the game. And ''Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People'' features the "ye flask" again, and an extended rant about people insensitively leaving "ye flasks" out without letting people get them.

 

* This (along with other early [[Adventure Game]] tropes, especially their tendency to be [[Nintendo Hard]]) is played with in ''[[Dinosaur Comics]]''. [http://www.qwantz.com/archive/000778.html One strip] sees T-Rex wondering what life would be like as a text-based adventure; Utahraptor points out that no one would ever be able to get out of bed until they found the right command:

{{quote|{{smallcaps|get up}}

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

 

* ''[[Cracked.com]]'' 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.

* ''[[SCP Foundation]]'': [http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-603 SCP-603-44] is an [[Interactive Fiction]] game in which almost all commands players have tried to input have resulted in messages saying that there is no such object here or that "you cannot [do X]."

 

* There's a slight variation for anybody programming in Inform 7. Much of the syntax is intuitive, but one can't intuit what won't be intuitive. The result is less [[Guess the Verb]] and more "Guess the punctuation and sentence structure. ''Exactly''."

** Well, making ''creating'' adventure games more like ''playing'' adventure games ''was'' one of the stated goals...though on the upside, it still arguably has a shallower learning curve than TADS.