Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It

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Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It
Studio Infocom
Publisher Infocom
Senior Developer Jeff O'Neill
Erstveröffent-
lichung
1987
platform Amiga , Apple II , Atari ST , C64 , DOS , Mac OS
Game engine ZIL
genre Text adventure
Game mode Single player
control keyboard
medium diskette
language English
copy protection Enclosure referencing

Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It is a text adventure from Infocom that was published in 1987 for various hardware platforms. Nord and Bert was unique among Infocom games since it highly surrealistic been and are essentially wordplay and puns turned.

action

Nord and Bert has no set plot and consists of eight chapters. Something has changed the reality in the city of Punster , proverbs and clichés suddenly manifest themselves in the literal sense. The player's job is to fix this again. The first seven chapters can be played in any order, in order to reach the last chapter the player has to enter the passwords collected in the previous chapters.

chapter

  • "The Shopping Bizarre" - The chapter takes place in a grocery store in which normal goods have been replaced by homonyms . The player has to convert the goods back to their original form by simply typing in the correct names.
  • "Playing Jacks" - The player has an object called "Jack of All Traits" (a pun on jack of all trades ). This can be transformed into different items, all of which revolve around "Jack" to end the chapter (e.g. Jack Frost , Jackknive )
  • "Buy the Farm" - On a farm, the player has to literally implement a multitude of clichés.
  • "Eat Your Words" - again literally translated idioms, this time in a fast-food restaurant. You have to take turns insulting the waitress and apologizing. The exasperated waitress finally lets the player into the kitchen, where more puns await.
  • "Act the Part" - The player participates in a 1950s-style sitcom and has to perform slapstick comedy.
  • "Manor of Speaking" - This chapter takes place in a house full of bizarre rooms. Among other things, there is a room with a speaking portrait of Karl Marx .
  • "Shake a Tower" - This section is all about shaking rhymes ( Shake a tower becomes Take a shower ).
  • "Meet the Mayor" - In the eighth chapter elements of the previous chapters are mixed together. The player tries to convince the mayor to sign a law against the changes in reality.

Game principle and technology

Nord & Bert is a text adventure, which means that the environment and events are displayed as screen text and the actions of the player are also entered as text using the keyboard and processed by a parser . Navigation in the game does not take place, as is usual in most text adventures, by entering direction commands ("north", "south" etc.), but you select adjacent locations via a menu.

The game has a help system called InvisiClues , which gives the player help in increasing detail on selectable points in the game.

Production notes

All Infocom games contained various extra inserts in the packaging. In this case, the game was accompanied by a booklet with eight word game cartoons by Mad illustrator Kevin Pope, which illustrate the principle of word games. Pope also contributed comics for the front and back of the original packaging.

reception

reviews
publication Rating
Atari ST DOS
Advanced computer entertainment k. A. 90
ASM 8/12 k. A.

ACE magazine found that due to the nature of the puzzles, the player would find part of it very easy and part of it unsolvable, and that it was therefore advisable to play Nord and Bert as a group, as each player would consider other puzzles to be solvable . The magazine came to a very positive rating, but stated that the game was unsuitable for lovers of traditional adventure games. The German ASM saw the game as a "challenge for many months" not least because of the required "perfect knowledge of English". For players with very good English skills, Nord & Bert is "very amusing".

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b ACE # 04, January 1988, p. 52: Nord 'n' Bert: Infocom lunacy for puzzle addicts. Retrieved June 8, 2016 .
  2. a b Stephan Englhart: Can you make sense of the whole? . In: ASM . January 1988.