Yeah, that’s strange. Many years have passed and I don’t remember which game I was playing (maybe the Hulk game linked above?) nor why I didn’t know the “correct” term. The only thing that I remember is that I had to guess the word and it wasn’t the right one.
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But you had the manuals (in most cases they had the verb lists)? Or had the games no manuals? Or have you “lost” the manuals? 
I’m sure that I didn’t have anything except for the game. I don’t even remember if it was on floppy or on a datassette. I don’t remember where the owner of the C64 bought the game but it was probably purchased in a newsstand in Italy (at the time they were full of C64 games, both legal and pirated).
I may be a little to harsh on this point, but I think if a text adventure has to revert to verb lists, it’s not made properly. Early text adventures may have needed to do this, as the parsers improved, many alternate ways of expressing what you wanted to do were allowed. A major component of how I judge the quality of a text adventure by how flexible it is in this manner.
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Can you speak commands instead of typing them?
I think that books and games are two extremely different media: the first one is more passive, while the second one is interactive. The fact the both media can be based on texts doesn’t necessarily imply that people who like the more passive activity should also like the more active one.
Also, I think it’s important to mention that the brain always tries to save energy and intellectual activities consume more energy than lying on the beach doing nothing. If you read a book, you consume more energy. If you play a videogame (even a textual one) you consume even more energy.
Just a couple of days ago I downloaded “Stories Untold” from Steam, and played it. This is an interesting game, because it uses some text adventure components, but it’s not really a text adventure, so I suppose I should give it a little slack, but I was very frustrated by it’s text adventure parser in the first chapter. I’ve encountered these kinds of problems in other text adventures, this one just comes to mind because it was so recent.
OK, spoilers blurred below.
At the beginning, you read a note which makes it clear you need to go around to the back of the house and start a generator. Simple enough, right? It took me well over a half hour to figure out what it needed me to type to accomplish that, I even had to resort to searching on the web for a hint I was so frustrated. Perhaps I had too much text adventure experience, so I expected more from the parser, but language like “walk around the house” and “walk to back yard” and “go to side of house / back of the house” were not working. Eventually I realized I needed to type “go to yard”, and then “look around”, so I could see there was a generator nearby (not shown in the room description until you type that, weird), and then I could “start generator”. I was very annoyed and almost stopped playing the game, but I took a deep breath and went on, hoping I would not have to deal with their parser much more, and was pleasantly surprised in the second chapter I didn’t have to.
Despite all that, I do recommend that game so far, I’ve completed 2 chapters our of 4 and played for 2-3 hours.
The spoiler stuff above doesn’t really spoil the intent of the story, and it’s only at the very beginning, so if you intend to play the game and don’t mind ‘light spoilers’, I think it’s pretty safe.
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I full agree on this. But I referred to older adventures and as you said:
The Infocom adventures were very good and I think the later ones didn’t came with a verb list anymore… But most of the “cheap” text adventures understood only a few verbs. Especially if they came with pictures. 
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thank you bes… you showed me that what I believed to be impossible is indeed possible. 
Basically, you knew where you wanted to go, but you did not know how that place was called (“yard”).
And I thought this to be impossible: how can you not know the name of a place, if the authors have written “from here you see the yard”, calling it with a specific name? But apparently the authors hadn’t written that, and I could never imagine this.
No, to give the game credit, that was written in the description. The way to play the game is to a) assume the parser is pretty dumb, and b) just minimally type what to do based on what you see in the description. I’m coming from having played probably over a hundred text adventures which haven’t had those kinds of expectations since the origin of the genre. As I said, I may be being unfair because of that. The game did provide clues of exactly what to say, I just don’t think text adventures should require that kind of restrictive parroting to accomplish the goals of the game. I don’t find that kind of text adventure fun to play, because it breaks the immersion for me.
I see. but then I was even more wrong. Because if the authors wrote the name of the place, I would have said it was impossible that you might not think to write “go to PLACE”.
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This is a pretty good page explaining the ‘guess the verb’ problem, and giving several examples from different games.
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I have been cracking up for 1 minute reading “you can’t get ye flask!” . This is gold!
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Be careful with that site… it’s one of the greatest time-sinks in the Internet! 
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“Detectiveland” has a very interesting UI. Very good… basically, in order to do “break door with crowbar”, you do this:
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in the inventory, you find the crowbar, and you click “hold”. So you hold it in your hand.
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then if you go to the location with the door, you see a new verb “break” has appeared on the door, a verb which previously was not there. If you were not holding the crowbar, but the pipe, you wouldn’t see the verb.
This way they allow you to combine two objects without asking the user to click another object, and therefore without the possibility that the user sees the standard error message (“this does not make sense”). Because if you are holding the wrong object in your hand, you don’t see the verb at all.
Very, very clever. It’s like a cruise for a corpse UI, improved. (Only, I would have made the verbs popup, so until you click the door you don’t see a new verb for the door has appeared).
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This just popped up on my Twitter feed today. I’ve spent about 30 seconds with it, but it looks amazing! I’ll be checking it out more this weekend! From what I can tell, an automatically created text adventure, using Wikipedia as it’s data source. OK, no story, but points for a creative concept! And it looks like it auto-creates some very pixelated maybe 16-color graphics for the locations you visit based on the images on the Wiki pages.
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Hey, the example in there from “Curses” was a puzzle I actually liked! Compared to some of the others in that game it was pretty gentle
That was fun, thanks.
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Thanks for the recommendations. 
I’m playing Hunger Daemon right now, on Glulxe and drawing the map both manually and with the automapping help of Trizbort:
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Oh, that’s cool. I just checked out the web page for Tribortz - It watches the game transcript and as you discover rooms through your own progress it auto-updates the map.
I’m looking forward to hearing what you think of Hunger Daemon.
I recently started playing Suspended (Infocom). I remember playing as a teen, but I can’t remember if I finished it. It’s a complex game, but very interesting. I am playing that on my iPad in the “Lost Treasures of Infocom” app.
I remember playing Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy and Dallas Quest when I was young… Maybe some others too. Wouldn’t probably play them now.
I did program some text adventure games on my C64. One of them was Police Academy after the movie series. Never published. Maybe should have. Probably no-one would have noticed I used the IP unauthorized. wink wink Ron.
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