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You Can't Get Ye Flask: Difference between revisions

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You Can't Get Ye Flask (view source)

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== 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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** 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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=== [[MMORPG]]s ===
* 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 QuestEverQuest]]'' 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.
*** 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".
* 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]] ===
* ''[[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.
 
== Non-video game examples: ==
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{{quote|{{smallcaps|get up}}
== 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]]''.
** [[Jail Break|What]] [[Running Gag|pumpkin]]?
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