History Main / YouCantGetYeFlask

* ''VideoGame/{{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 ''[[VideoGame/TheSpellcastingSeries Spellcasting 101]]'' series tried to avert this trope by showing a complete list of all the verbs the game would accept in a sidebar; you could play the entire game with just a mouse.
* Infocom's text adventure adaptation of James Clavell's ''Literature/{{Shogun}}'' has the protagonist trying to communicate with the Japanese by searching for a common language. Some players tried inputs in actual foreign languages, which wouldn't work. But if you typed something like "Say 'where am I' in Spanish", you'd crash the parser.
* ''VideoGame/TheMultiDimensionalThief'' has some changes between version 1 and version 2. "Put Hole on North" works in the AGT version, but version 2 requires typing the full "put hole on north wall".

* The original ''ADVENT'', ''a.k.a.'' ''VideoGame/ColossalCave'', had a sequence that looked like a [[DevelopersForesight snappy comeback to a stupid input]], but was actually required to progress, as it was the only way to kill the dragon:
--> > kill dragon\\
With what? Your bare hands?\\
> [[BluntYes yes]]\\
Congratulations, you have [[ViolationOfCommonSense just vanquished a dragon with your bare hands!]] (Hard to believe, isn't it?)
* The EdutainmentGame ''VideoGame/VoicesOfSpoonRiver'' 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.
* ''VideoGame/AdVerbum'' 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 is willing to accept a large number of words that wouldn't appear in a normal game.
* In ''VideoGame/TheSixFootTallManEatingChicken'' asks you at one point to plug a hole in a bucket with a cork. The words "plug" and "use" don't work; you have to [[spoiler:write "put", which is not otherwise used]].
* Infocom's ''VideoGame/{{Enchanter}}'' at one point places an essential scroll (essential as in "the game cannot be successfully completed without it") inside a mouse hole. Retrieving the scroll is complicated in that "get scroll" doesn't work, and neither does "get all from hole," or any permutation thereof. The only command that will work is "reach into hole," which wouldn't have been so aggravating if "reach" was used anywhere else in the game.
* This sort of problem, among others, is heavily parodied in the Adrift games featuring Clueless Bob Newbie, text adventure "author" and legend in his own mind.
* Apple II adventure game ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mask_of_the_Sun The Mask of the Sun]]'' featured a battle against a skeleton which could only be defeated by using a magic amulet picked up earlier in the game. Unfortunately, the only phrase which would allow you to successfully battle the skeleton was the non-intuitive "FIGHT AMULET". Computer game developer Dan Spitzley described the anguish this generated within his family on IGN's [[https://web.archive.org/web/20051230085426/http://rpgvaultarchive.ign.com/archive/19990822.shtml RPG Vault]] in 1999.
* One puzzle in the Platform/ZXSpectrum game ''Danger! Adventurer at Work!'' is to [[Franchise/{{Frankenstein}} animate a monster using electricity]]. The only commands which will do this are "ATTACH ELECTRODES" followed by "THROW SWITCH". Reasonable alternatives such as "CONNECT WIRES" or "TURN ON POWER" don't work.

---> >examine knife
---> You can't see that here.\\

* ''Burial Ground Adventure'' for the TRS-80 has at least [[https://bluerenga.blog/tag/burial-ground-adventure/?order=ASC two puzzles]] which suffer from this problem, both times apparently forced by the limitation of two-word commands. In the first one, you need to get out of the pit by making a lasso with a rope and catching a rock outside the pit to climb out. Commands such as "tie rope", "attach rope" etc. don't work--you need to "throw rope". In another example, a trap door in the ceiling must be opened by pushing it open with a bamboo stalk. The command to type? Not "open door" or even "push door": it's ''"push bamboo"''.
* Parodied in ''The Very Big Cave Adventure'', in the location "The Brand New Sophisticated Parser Cave". The game takes every opportunity to misinterpret the commands you enter, including taking advantage of the fact that only the first four letters of a word are significant:
---> >get parser
---> You can't see a parsimonious filing-clerk here.
* ''[[VideoGame/Supernova1987 Supernova]]'' had two cases where the player need to use an adverb in order to progress the game: "Listen carefully", and "examine robot carefully". As a side note, adverbs themselves had synonyms, which would accept "Listen gently".
* Text adventures released by Spinnaker Software (including their subsidiary, Windham Classics) would often let you call up a list of words that could be accepted in the context of the current screen as AntiFrustrationFeatures.
* The trope namer was directly inspired by a game called [[https://www.mobygames.com/game/vampires-castle-adventure "Vampire's Castle"]], a game written in only 181 lines of Basic code and with a particularly fussy text parser that only looks at the first three letters of each word you type.
** Vampire's Castle eventually got a [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3-0vXrBwwE playthrough/mockery video]] from Strong Bad.

-->-> open bolt
-->Please say "undo bolt".

* Creator/{{Sierra}} was infamous for this sort of problem, as its parser never evolved beyond simple "<verb> <noun>" phrases, even after a decade:
** Sierra's very first game, ''VideoGame/MysteryHouse'', infamously accepted "PRESS BUTTON" but not "PUSH BUTTON".
** ''VideoGame/LeisureSuitLarry2LookingForLoveInSeveralWrongPlaces'' had an infamous sequence at the end where the player has to make a bomb using an airsick bag as the wick. The problem is that "bag" is not considered a synonym for "airsick bag", despite there being no other bag in a five-mile radius. Lead programmer Al Lowe [[http://www.allowe.com/Larry/cluescheats.htm#Larry2 explained]] that this was the result of an unrelated bug which another programmer fixed by turning "bag" into a verb, which Lowe never noticed and escaped all testing. [[UrbanLegendOfZelda Longtime scuttlebutt]] suggested that the correct command was a full but grammatically incorrect sentence with the word "the" repeated several times.

** In the first ''VideoGame/SpaceQuest'' game, you have to "insert" the keycard. No synonym or rephrasing of that unusual and unnecessarily technical term will be accepted.

** If you enter something incorrectly in the latter half of ''VideoGame/GoldRush'', it would tell you that "there ain't such a word as ...". Humorously, it will still give you that message if the word in question is "ain't".

* ''VideoGame/HeroinesQuest'' references the TropeNamer; if you try to take certain flasks from the herbalist's shop, it will straight-up tell you that "you can't get ye flask".

* The ''Website/{{Cracked}}'' page "[[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"]] describes the AI reacting with shocked horror to the insane player's [[VideoGameCrueltyPotential sadistic commands]] and eventually [[VideoGameCrueltyPunishment feeding him to a swarm of monsters]] out of spite.

-->'''You are a greasy Italian spaz standing on a platform unsupported in the middle of the yawning void of space.'''
-->'''What Now?'''
-->'''> DIE OF ASPHYXIATION'''
-->'''[[BatmanCanBreatheInSpace You can't do that (somehow).]]'''

* In the ''LetsPlay/MarioPartyTV'' series, after several incidents where correctly guessing a certain fruit during Mic Mini-games was treated as a mistake, the guys realized that they were saying ''grape'', not ''grapes''.
* Parodied in the [[http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html "Death of Adventure Games"]] article of Website/OldManMurray.
-->'''You are on a pirate ship!'''
-->> Go north!
-->'''You can't go north!'''
-->> Examine ship!
-->'''I don't see a ship here!'''
* The article [[http://nightmaremode.thegamerstrust.com/2012/11/25/creation-under-capitalism/ Creation Under Capitalism and the Twine Revolution]] by Charity Porpentine Heartscape identifies this trope as a major limitation of text parser-based interactive fiction: "5 minutes of fighting the parser to hug someone is not ideal. It’s like your movie has 5 minutes of someone drooling during a romantic interlude."
* There's an example of this in ''Roleplay/RubyQuest'', as a result of a player misspelling a word and Weaver not understanding the resulting command. The player said 'pick up monocol', which was presumably a misspelling of '[[HighClassGlass monocle]]'. Weaver replied that there was no 'monocol' in the room. The item the player was probably referring to was the eye dial, which pretty much just looked like a small circle in the simplistic art style.

* ''VideoGame/{{Elona}}'' occasionally lets you [[MakeAWish type in an item's name and have it granted to you]]. However, the text parser is wonky and sometimes grants you something different from what you wanted.

-->$ where am i

* At one point, the cast of ''Webcomic/OkashinaOkashi'' 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. This led to jokes about bad parsing, shouting "''Why'' can't I get ye flask!", and crying.

%% * [[http://www.thenoobcomic.com/index.php?pos=199 This]] page of Webcomic/TheNoob. [[Apparently not, because the linked comic doesn't appear to reference the trope]].

-->Unrecognized command. Type "help" for assistance.
-->$ help
-->That would be cheating!

* During a 'dream-sequence' in ''Webcomic/{{SSDD}}'', Tess finds herself beset by a text-parser and - with her habitual lack of patience for AI's - quickly pissed off by it. This eventually results in a strip which is actually a fully-functional text-adventure, complete with low-def images in brilliant TANDY colors. Playable [[http://poisonedminds.com/d/20170429.html here]].

The TropeNamer is ''WebAnimation/HomestarRunner'', specifically the ''WebAnimation/StrongBadEmail'' "[[Recap/StrongBadEmailE94VideoGames video games]]", where Strong Bad imagines himself as a character in [[VideoGame/ThyDungeonman a text-based adventure game]] and envisions this problem occurring:

Mostly a ForgottenTrope these days. The main cause was the decline of text-based adventure games with parsing commands which were replaced by graphics-based adventure games, especially point-and-click adventure games which in turn were replaced by other genres. Another was the aforementioned parsing improvements. The parodies of the trope also became less frequent as fewer people were familiar with those games. Finally, years after the trope was forgotten, recreations of text-based adventure games using language models not only fixed text parsing issues, but also provided much better understanding of the context of the input.

* To this day, LPMUD still can't parse ''look <object>'' without admonishing the player to "Look AT or IN something." Even some DikuMUDS still hold to this convention. Even though ''examine <object>'' can be abbreviated to ''x <object>'', ''look'' won't be accepted without a preposition. Creator/{{Infocom}} and Creator/{{Legend|entertainment}} games likewise do not accept "look <object>" or "use <object>" on grounds that they aren't meaningful sentences.

* ''VideoGame/Deathmaze5000'', for the UsefulNotes/TRS80 and UsefulNotes/AppleII, contained ([[http://www.platypuscomix.net/applepalooza/deathmaze.html among other things]]) several problems of this type:

* One puzzle in the UsefulNotes/ZXSpectrum game ''Danger! Adventurer at Work!'' is to [[Franchise/{{Frankenstein}} animate a monster using electricity]]. The only commands which will do this are "ATTACH ELECTRODES" followed by "THROW SWITCH". Reasonable alternatives such as "CONNECT WIRES" or "TURN ON POWER" don't work.

* Many text parsers are modelled off UNIX command lines. UsefulNotes/{{UNIX}} in general is precise, arbitrary, and ''case-sensitive''. "/Home" would be interpreted as a different directory than "/home". It doubles as a DamnYouMuscleMemory if you're used to another command-line interface like DOS (used in Windows Command Prompt) -- all command lines have a tendency to do this (which is why they're not used so much today). Fortunately, the command ''man [command]'' will print an extensive [[AllThereInTheManual manual page]] for whatever command "[command]" is; unfortunately, you basically have to be fluent in Linux jargon anyway to decipher half of it. Among the parser issues:

* The UsefulNotes/XboxOne's voice recognition can feel like this sometimes, due to the unintuitive nature of some of the commands and the fact that a list of commands is not included with the console (though one can be found on the official Xbox support forums). For instance, if you want to start playing a game, you can't say, "Xbox, play [game]", or "Xbox, start [game]", or "Xbox, launch [game]"; you have to say "Xbox, ''go to'' [game]." And while you can say "Xbox on" to power the Xbox up, saying "Xbox off" doesn't turn it off; you have to say "Xbox, ''turn'' off."

* WebVideo/TheAngryVideoGameNerd encountered this problem trying to play ''The Count'' on the UsefulNotes/VIC20, resulting in this exchange where he can't even find his way out of a room:

Congratulations, you have [[ViolationOfCommonSense killed the dragon with your bare hands!]] (Unbelievable, isn't it?)