You Can't Get Ye Flask: Difference between revisions

The name of this trope is a reference to ''[[Homestar Runner]]''. In the Strong Bad E-Mail [http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail94.html video games], Strong Bad imagines himself as a character in a text-based adventure game, and imagines the problem above:

 

 

[[Interactive Fiction]] aficionados claim that this problem was rarely all that bad except in the earliest and worst examples of the genre, and they get really cheesed off that [[Never Live It Down|it's the one thing about the format that people still remember]]. Of course, the fact that it ''is'' the one thing they remember is telling... but then, the company most widely known for their [[Text Parser]] adventure games (Sierra, of ''[[King's Quest]]'' and ''[[Space Quest]]'' fame) is also the one with one of the worst parsers ever, that didn't improve much in the six years they used it before switching to a [[Point and Click Game|Point And Click]] mouse interface.

* 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.

* Parodied in ''[[Hugo's House of Horrors]]'':

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!!!''

* 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:

== Don't know how to "FUCK" something. == }}

** The game ''Asylum'' knew those words... use them once and you get a warning, use them again and it boots you from the game!

* ''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:

== Yourself does not wish to dance with you. == }}

* 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.

* 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.

* ''[[Zork]]'' games suffered from this to some extent, but they ''did'' also have some rather amusing responses to bizarre lines the player typed:

It is a known fact that only schizophrenics talk to grues.'' }}

 

Autocannibalism is not the answer.'' }}

 

I doubt the grue lurking in the dark would agree with you.'' }}

 

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.

* The original 'ADVENT', also known as ''[[Colossal Cave]]'', had something that looked like a snappy comeback, but was actually a question to answer:

What? With your bare hands? }}

** To kill the dragon, you actually have to answer that question with "yes".

* 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 this--for instance, one room is described entirely in words beginning with S, and will only accept commands beginning with S (of note: the only exit is to the '''north'''). On the plus side, the parser's willing to accept a large number of words that wouldn't appear in a normal game.

== [[Web Comics]] ==

* 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:

== 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.