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

by Jeff O'Neill

Wordplay
1987

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(21)
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Number of Ratings: 57
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- ENyman78 (Gold Beach, OR), October 29, 2023

- Andrew Schultz (Chicago), September 8, 2023

Please explain the title of this game!!, January 13, 2023

by hg

I remember playing this game decades ago, and loving it! I don't recall too many details at this point, but as a word lover I found it fantastic, some sections more than others.

I've never understood the wordplay in the title, though I'm sure there is some involved. Can anybody explain the joke in the title, please? I would be forever grateful to you for elucidating something that has vexed me for years!

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Play half, skip the rest, January 2, 2023
by Lance Cirone (Backwater, Vermont)

Nord and Bert was the first piece of interactive fiction I ever played. I read about it and it sounded right up my alley. Looking back, it's definitely got its great moments, but also some not-so-fun parts. You can play the levels in any order you want, and they don't have any interconnected story elements, so I'll recap them all:

Shopping Bizarre: One of the highlights. You run around a supermarket and make all kinds of crazy things (turn a sale into a sail, or a moose into mousse). The homophone theming is fun and never feels too obscure. Prime segment here.

Playing Jacks: Use a bunch of tools with "jack" in the name. I actually broke this one on accident. (Spoiler - click to show)The mermaid simply wasn't showing up after I did the jacuzzi scene. It's a cool concept, but needing to remember how to activate my tools slowed me down a bit. The jacked-up coding makes it a pass.

Buy the Farm: Might be my favorite level. You try to restore an empty farm through taking idioms literally, like teaching the old dog new tricks, or putting the cart before the horse. One very tricky puzzle here, though. Still, horse around with this one for a bit.

Eat Your Words: Harass and inconvenience a waitress and a cook, also by taking idioms literally. A lot of the terms you have to use here are pretty obscure, so it's easy to get stuck. It and Buy the Farm are like two peas in a pod, but this one's a harder nut to crack.

Act the Part: Act in a 50s sitcom and get your annoying brother in-law to leave. This segment doesn't really have any relevance to the rest of the game, contains some really esoteric puzzles, and it's easy to make it unwinnable. Hook it off the stage.

Manor of Speaking: Confusing and pointless. Find a way to scare a portrait of Karl Marx. Also, there's a room in this one with a frustrating mechanic (can't use the same verb twice) that just slowed it down. Quiet it up and move on. (Or play Hulk Handsome's similarly-named game, because that one's awesome!)

Shake a Tower: A fun return to the earlier segments! Come up with silly spoonerisms (a head louse becomes a lead house, a shoving leopard becomes a loving shepherd) to save the day. I do have to warn against a game-breaking bug here, since my (Spoiler - click to show)well-oiled bicycle just disappeared between rooms for no reason. Going into this one was a pretty rough take considering how the quality was slipping, but it actually felt relevant.

Meet the Mayor: You can only play this part once you've finished all the others. Is it worth it? Not really, it just feels anticlimactic and doesn't really work as a review of what you've learned. Tell the mayor I'm out.

Half of Nord and Bert is witty and comical. The other half is baffling and just not that fun. Whenever I return to the game, I go through Shopping Bizarre, Buy the Farm, and Shake a Tower, maybe Eat Your Words, and leave the rest. It's a good game with some bad segments, rather than the other way around, so that even out into a 3/5 star rating.

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1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Ugh., February 13, 2022
by cgasquid (west of house)

wordplay games have always been a tough genre to get right. on the one hand, you want to have consistent rules for word manipulation, so the player isn't just sitting there guessing words. you want to have the puzzles actually fit together into a larger picture, whether that's a treasure hunt (Letters from Home) or a detailed plot (Counterfeit Monkey). you need to make sure the game is tuned to the language, not to pop culture references, to ensure the game doesn't become incomprehensible five years from now.

out of the short stories that make up Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It ... one, perhaps two, fit any of these criteria.

the general pattern of these stories is to recognize the kind of "wordplay" at work in the story, then just examine items and type every example of that wordplay you can think of. in "Playing Jacks," you have to know a lot of words that have "jack" in them. in "Shopping Bizarre," if you see an item, you type its homophone. the biggest offender here is probably "Eat Your Words," which is just see object, type cliche naming object, continue.

there is a single highlight here: "Manor of Speaking." it's a haunted house game where each ghost has a different obsession, and you play them off against each other and solve actual puzzles riffing off wordplay. it's brief but delightful.

by contrast, the worst of the lot is "Act the Part," which requires the player to be familiar not only with unfunny gags from downmarket 1950s sitcoms, but also to recognize a phrase that is as opaque to me now as it was back then ((Spoiler - click to show)"better a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy"). this stuff was dated when it came out. (ironically, the opening-move puzzle in "Act," despite being incredibly frustrating, is one of the few that's stood the test of time.)

similarly culture-specific and extremely difficult are "Buy the Farm" and "Shake a Tower." "Farm" is at least well-written (most of Nord and Bert has nothing but short, terse responses) but some of the expressions in it are already passing out of English parlance. "Tower" uses spoonerisms, but it's also very cruel, utterly nonsensical, and nearly impossible to get a perfect score on.

people talk about the Oddly Angled Rooms from Zork II being too culture-specific. at least there there are at least three countries whose inhabitants should get the joke.

if all of this were beautifully written, or tied together in a coherent fashion, it might be another story. but it's just checking off disparate scenarios until you're allowed to go on to the last one, "Meet the Mayor," which is basically the same as "Buy the Farm" but with much more obscure language. (some of the phrases in "Mayor" are so obscure that even now, almost thirty years later, i've still never heard anyone use them.)

most of the games that Nord and Bert inspired did the job better. i was a huge Infocom fad, to the point of a fault, but there are still a couple of their games that i just can't defend. this is one of them.

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- Lance Campbell (United States), December 24, 2021

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Some Fantastic Highlights and Regrettable Lowlights, August 20, 2021
by ccpost (Greensboro, North Carolina)

I desperately want to love this game, but sadly I can only sort of like it. I'm obsessed with words, odd phrases, and idioms, so I went into this game with quite high hopes. Broken up into a series of 'interactive short stories,' a few of the stories are fantastically fun and pull off the wordplay game mechanic marvelously. A few of the stories are confusing and confounding to the point of being unplayable.

The stories that really shine -- "Shake a Tree," "Buy the Farm," "Shopping Bizarre" being the main highlights -- integrate wordplay like spoonerisms and taking idioms literally in truly inventive ways. As your playing with words often alters the game world, there are many opportunities for surreal, odd, and plain funny happenstances (Spoiler - click to show)like when some locks on a door become smoked salmon lox...that need to be 'unloxed' . O'Neill's writing in these sections is superb, conveying the strangeness of some surreal transformation caused by you invoking a bit of word play.

If this had been sustained for a full game (a la Counterfeit Monkey), I would easily give this game a 5 star review. However, the short stories that fall flat fall very, very flat. At least two of the stories almost certainly necessitate using the (fortunately built-in) hints, as the 'puzzles' involve guessing at some joke or bit of cleverness that you have only some vague idea of. This is essentially the same driving mechanic in the stories that work well -- except you are able to arrive at the right conclusions by playing around with the words in the text. For stories like "Manor of Speaking" and "Act the Part," there is very little actual wordplay involved, and few other clues in the text as to how to make progress.

Although I absolutely love the parts of the game that work, the fact that I was forced to heavily rely on hints and walkthroughs for nearly half the game seriously soured my overall experience.

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3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Painfully dated and old-fashioned, September 12, 2020
by dvs

This classic Infocom game is essentially seven short adventures, mostly needing knowledge of idioms or other wordplay, with a final endgame.

A few of the short adventures were basic and occasionally amusing, but half (Eat Your Words, Act the Part, Manor of Speaking, the endgame) are so random or painful or annoying to solve. The only way I could get through was with the hints but I found these extremely annoying.

Perhaps I would have enjoyed the struggles and found the wordplay and amusing in high school but in 2020 this game did not age well.

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- jcompton, June 23, 2020

- The Defiant, June 17, 2020

- Zape, June 3, 2020

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
A spotty Infocom game with great highlights, June 17, 2019
by MathBrush
Related reviews: 2-10 hours

This is an interesting game. With wordplay games, the question is, how can you make a game about wordplay that lasts long? One answer is to follow Emily Short's example and just put tons of content into a game (Counterfeit Monkey).

This game achieves its length through unfairness. Parts of this game (it's basically several mini-games put together) are wonderful: Buy the Farm was particularly good, as was the Shopping Bizarre. Those two would make a wonderful game pulled out on their own, one relying on American English sayings and the other on homonyms.

Some parts of this game don't make any sense. I didn't understand In a Manor of Speaking (which btw is also the name of a great Hulk Handsome game) at all, and looking it up, I still haven't found a good explanation at all. I believe having the Doldrums was a mistake, because it made you think everything else had a gimmick (like Gary Larson's infamous Cow Tools cartoon).

But if the game wasn't unfair, it wouldn't last very long. The only way I've seen fair wordplay games achieve length is through tons of content, like I said. Andrew Schultz does this with exhaustive code-enhanced wordspace searches. Shuffling Around is a good example of this.

I also like the Act your Part session. It was nonsensical, but I was able to get a lot of points just doing dumb stuff.

I played the version released by Zarf who was re-releasing Jason Scott's releasing of previously unreleased Infocom releases.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
If you love perd wuzzles, then yule love this!, April 29, 2019
by deathbytroggles (Minneapolis, MN)

Have you ever wanted to get a nice juicy steak, but all you had was a stake? Have you ever wanted to literally kill two birds with one stone? Or have you come across a pretty girl and it made you long for a gritty pearl? Then you should definitely help out Nord and Bert, because they truly can’t make hails or teds of it. Wait, um…

My favorite language based game until Counterfeit Monkey was released, Nord & Bert has you playing with homonyms, spoonerisms, idioms, and other plays on our language and culture in order to help save the town of Punster from total chaos. There’s a story, but it’s there to serve the puzzles. Just dig in and get your lexicon dirty.

The game designers smartly realized that most gamers would not be intimately familiar with every phrase, idiom, and slang the game is riddled with; thus, an in-game hint system is a welcome sight. Despite the occasional frustration that ignorance creates while playing, the game can be funny and very satisfying when you do advance on your own intellect. Nord & Bert is a must-play for those who love word puzzles. Hardcore adventurers may want to look elsewhere. Naturally, non-native English speakers would struggle here, as well as at times non-Americans.

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- BitterlyIndifferent, July 4, 2018

- stet, November 22, 2017

- snickerdoddle, April 23, 2017

- Audiart (Davis, CA), February 24, 2017

- Thrax, March 11, 2015

- Sobol (Russia), September 12, 2014

- Captain Sidekick, May 2, 2014

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- lisapaul, January 9, 2014

- KidRisky (Connecticut, USA), December 20, 2013

- KGH (North Carolina), June 10, 2013

- pcbrannon, February 24, 2013

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- Puddin Tame (Queens, NY), October 28, 2012

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- Nav (Bristol, UK), November 25, 2011

- Jeff Zeitlin (Greater New York Area), September 6, 2011

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- Sam Kabo Ashwell (Seattle), August 2, 2011

- André St-Aubin (Laval, Québec), May 31, 2011

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- Muskie, August 11, 2010

- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), June 11, 2010

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Guess the Noun!, March 12, 2010
by tggdan3 (Michigan)

What a weird game!

Of all the guess-the-verb puzzles I've hated over the years, this one is actually fun, though the entire game seems to be a series of guess the verb (or guess the noun) puzzles.

You choose between a few different locales based on different language-isms. One is based on spoonerisms, where you must turn a Gritty Pearl into a Pretty Girl. Another is based on homonyms, where you must turn the steak into a stake so you can kill a vampire. Another is on puns, where you must eat a group of lions (swallow your pride!) and eat humble pie, turn the tables (literally) etc. Yet another has you doing cliches, such as making a mountain out of a molehill or killing two birds with one stone.

The gameplay consists mainly of you looking at stuff, then trying to guess what cliche was intended. When you see that you have one stone, you must figure out that you need to kill two birds with it, or when the mice are sliding around in the grain, you need to let a cat on them, because while the cats away the mice will play. If you are not familiar with these trite phrases, you won't get far, since there's nothing other to figure out. When you see a bunch of locks, you just type >LOX to turn them into fish.

While the gameplay can be interesting, it grates on you eventually, as you try to complete areas but you've run out of sayings so you don't know what else the game is looking for. But, if you like frustration, this is the game for you!

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- four1475 (Manhattan, KS), December 17, 2009

- GDL (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), July 28, 2009

- Miron (Berlin, Germany), June 29, 2009

- John D, March 14, 2009

- albtraum, February 8, 2009

- Nathan (Utah), October 25, 2008

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- Wendymoon, June 11, 2008

- Krishnoid (Sunnyvale, CA), May 22, 2008

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- Grunion Guy (Portland), March 24, 2008

- bolucpap, March 19, 2008

- jfpbookworm (Hamburg, New York), February 28, 2008

- Emily Short, February 20, 2008

- Matt Kimmel (Cambridge, MA), February 20, 2008

- Michael Martin (Mountain View, California), February 20, 2008


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