~2 minute readMULTI-SYSTEM Software
Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It
WARNING! This article contains spoilers. Avert your eyes!
NORD AND BERT COULDN'T MAKE HEAD OR TAIL OF IT (NA/⭐⭐⭐⭐) is a collection of short stories by Jeff O'Neill for Infocom. In typical Infocom fashion, these are unlike any short stories you've ever encountered. All eight tales take place in and around the town of Punster, and each involves some kind of word-play, such as spoonerisms, cliches, puns, and homonyms. Each story can be completed in a few hours' time or less, and seven are completely independent of each other. The eighth, "Meet the Mayor," depends on your completing the other seven because it utilizes passwords given at the conclusions of the stories. Unlike other Infocom stories, no mapping is required because all accessible locations are shown in the status line. To go to one of the locations, you need only type in its name. And you won't have to buy an Invisiclues book for NORD AND BERT because the Invisiclues are right in the program.
Caution: Words on the Loose
For this review, we played one of the stories to its conclusion ("Go to the Shopping Bizarre") and sampled the others. The Shopping Bizarre turned out to be a very strange place where our task was to restore order in a grocery store. It seems that a bunch of homonyms had gotten loose in the place and come to life. Thus our first encounter on the dessert aisle was a very large, brown moose. It was a chocolate moose, of course, and needed only to be reminded that it was a mousse to send it docilely into the freezer case where it belonged. That store was a strange place indeed, what with a cereal murderer loose on the Manicotti Aisle and other assorted crazy goings on. We had breafer encounters with the cliches in "Buy the Farm," the incredibly dumb jokes and puns in the 50s-style situation comedy, "Act the Part," the rooms with personalities in "Manor of Speaking," the food-related witticisms in "Eat Your Words," the common-root words in "Play Jacks," and the spoonerisms in "Shake a Tower" (where a "gritty pearl" is a "pretty girl"). We enjoyed them all.
Words and Witticisms
NORD AND BERT is a feast for lovers of words and witticisms. The typical Infocom irreverence leavens the mixture of stories, and Jeff O'Neill's sense of the absurd truly rises to the occasion. If you're fascinated by words and the improbable combinations of them that we often take for granted, then you'll love this collection. And since O'Neill and Infocom have provided us with the first-ever collection of interactive short stories, we may have the makings of a whole new party activity. One of these stories would make a wonderful addition to an evening's entertainment among friends. (Solo play; Keyboard; Blank disk required for game-saving.) Available for Amiga, 128K Apple II, Atari ST, IBM, 512K Macintosh; also for Commodore 128 at $34.95.
Recommended. (MSR $39.95)
These historical, out-of-print articles and literary works have been GNUSTOed onto InvisiClues.org for academic and research purposes.
