In King's Quest I loved being able to type in whatever I wanted and the game reacted to it. Imagine my horror, and the pile of vomit, when I first played King's Quest 5 in 1990 as a lad. I tried to type but nothing happened! They decided to dumb down the game by using an objectively inferior control system we now call the verb system.

With a text parser you can type whatever you want whenever you want and the game will always react to it. If you swear at the game it will yell at you and eventually quit. You can type in that you like dogs and the characters will tell you all about dogs. There's an endless number of possibilities, every response completely unique.

With the failure known as "verbs", the lazy developers give you a handfull of pre selected words or icons you can use. They even make walk one of the verbs, how lazy is that? Want to know what a character thinks of Bill Clinton? Can't, there's no verb for it.

The modern King Quest game is even worse, there are no verbs at all! You just click the screen like a computer desktop and that's all there is to it. The game decides what actions you can take and that's that. You might as well not even play it. Even with the verb system you could use any verb on any object.