Adventure Call takes the text-based RPGs of yore and puts a live narrator in the place of a text parser.
If you’ve never seen a call-in game show, you’re probably not missing much. If there were one worth watching, it’d definitely be Adventure Call, a regular sketch seen on the BBC’s Limmy’s Show which lampoons the genre perfectly and combines it with text-based games to boot.
Text-based titles like Zork often use a text parser to read the input of a player, such as “go east” or “get sword,” and provide a programmed response as output. Adventure Call turns that text parser into a live human, who often gets a little upset with his callers and is baffled by their idiocy.
The result is pretty hilarious, especially when callers try to “get troll.” A text parser never scolds anyone or gets frustrated like Falconhoof, Limmy’s Adventure Call persona.
Like a text-based game, Adventure Call players have to input their commands in the correct way or Falconhoof won’t recognize them. The clip below shows what happens when Falconhoof gets into an argument with a caller that doesn’t pick up his flying sandals properly. There are other clips floating around too, if you care to search for them.
