🧭 THE ARCHIVES

Quote of the day

A ghost appears in the room and is appalled at your desecration of the remains of a fellow adventurer. He casts a curse on your valuables and banishes them to the Land of the Living Dead. The ghost leaves, muttering obscenities.

-- Zork I

Factoid of the day

In Sorcer, the GOLMAC spell lets you travel backwards through time. The name GOLMAC is a portmanteau of "Gold Machine." In Zork III the Temporizer, which lets you travel backwards in time, is described as a "gold machine."

*Evil magic will not die. It waits. Underground. For the time it can return to claim its dominance.*
Aug 1993

Antic, v7(1)

~2 minute read

May 1988

New ST Entertainments

Nord and Bert

Jim Pierson-Perry

Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head Or Tail Of It is the long-winded title to the latest offering from Infocom, the reigning masters of interactive text adventures. To put it mildly, Nord and Bert is a major departure form Infocom's previous adventures. Success in this game relies on solving word games, having total recall of cliches and believing firmly that the pun is mightier than the sword.

The underlying thread in Nord and Bert is that a verbal disaster has hit the town of Punster. Normal speech has taken on magical qualities, causing a variety of problems that you have been called in to correct. There are eight separate hot-spots, each an independent mini-adventure, that need to be solved to save the day. Each site requires a different form of verbal magic to make progress. For example, calling a root a route could open up a trail through an impassable forest. In another case, finding the most laps would actually reveal lost maps.

Game play is also different in that all possible directions are posted on the screen. No need for mapping, the puzzles are reserved for word games. There's also an online hint feature -- a necessity for this game, given some of its more obscure references. The starting point for each scenario is to determine what type of word game is being played. These are consistent -- one scenario is all homonyms, another is spoonerisms, etc., with no overlapping.

Novelty aside, I cannot recommend this game. Its biggest flaw is inconsistency of play from one scenario to another. The puzzles are fairly trivial, compared to standard adventure games, but the word play ranges from easy to difficult. I love puzzles but when success rests on recalling every cliche in the book there is little challenge and less interest. The element of fairness is gone: either you know it or you don't, with no hope of finding a logical solution. I give Infocom an A for originality but will spend my money on something else.

$39.95. Infocom, 125 CambridgePark Drive, Cambridge, MA 02140. (617) 576-3190.

This article appeared in
Antic
May 1988

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