MACHINES: C64/128 disk (£24.99), Atari ST; Amiga; Apple II; Mackintosh, IBM PC (£29.99)
SUPPLIER: Activision/Infocom

The little town of Punster is suffering from an outbreak of a plague of verbicide. Language itself is in danger. Here are eight short stories set in Punster, for you to unravel, to break the plague. The stories mainly involve word play, but each in a different way.

In Eat Your Words, you find yourself in the Teapot Cafe. Here you must use well-known sayings within the context of the story.

The trouble is, this plot is rather linear, and if you miss out on a saying, you may not get a chance with many more.

The Shopping Bizarre story find you cast is a dessert aisle in a supermarket. So far, so good. This one involves puns. You see a man with bad breath, so you hop over to the Meets aisle, and type MINTS when you spot the mince. Thus you can cure the bad breather.

In Play Jacks, you are confronted by a contraption with many controls, and using each one in turn converts it into something else beginning with the word JACK.

For example, Jack in the box, Jack-knife, Jaccuzzi, and you have to use the different objects obtainable, to solve the puzzles.

Two sections in particular are great fun. In Buy the Farm, you must guess the well-known phase or saying. So when I had taught an old dog some new tricks, and he ran off and knocked over a milk churn. I was soon not crying over the result.

Shake A Tower is a story of spoonerisms, and that too proved highly playable. Easy prey was the queer old dean, and quickly spotted was a shoving leopard.

Treat Nord and Bert as a parlour game, play it in a group and you'll get a lot of fun out of it, even if you do speak English. It's nice to see Infocom branching out with new ideas.

Atari ST Diskette: £24.99
Amiga Diskette: £29.99
PC Diskette: £29.99
Commodore 64/128 Diskette only: £24.99
Amstrad Diskette only: £24.99
Atari XE/XL Diskette: £24.99

It is confession time I think, I have never played Ballyhoo! I mention this because Nord And Bert... was written by the same guy, Jeff O'Neill. Jeff (born 1958) left California State University armed only with an undergraduate degree in journalism and began his career with Infocom as a game tester - he specialised in playing Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy. His influences are Nietzsche (a prominent German Philosopher who, among other things, developed the theory of Superman (no, not the one who wears his knickers outside his trousers!),) and Mort Sahl (who didn't!). The very first Infocom story he wrote was Ballyhoo.

Nord And Bert is a decidedly different sort of offering from the Zork zone than we have come to expect. The first thing to note is that it is a collection of eight short stories each of which involves punning, wordplay and general verbal trickery. The scenarios are played independently of each other although a password has to be gleaned from the first seven (the order in which they are tackled is entirely up to the player) to enable access to the last story, which is entitled Meet The Mayor. The necessity for mapping is made redundant as accessible locations are displayed at the top of the screen and movement is gained by inputting the appropriate name. Examining items may be achieved by simply typing the name of the object the player wishes to study - no more examine errors! - although a closer look may require inputs such as LOOK INSIDE or LOOK THROUGH 'object name'.

The basic idea of the game is to study the locations and objects or characters in the vicinity and try to spot the spoonerisms (words with sounds transposed such as the 'well-boded icicle' and the ' well-oiled bicycle') or homonyms (differing words which sound alike, 'stair' and 'stare' for instance) to solve the puzzles. Whilst in the British aisle within the Shopping Bizarre scenario the player is confronted with a Box Boy who is busy putting boxes onto shelves beneath a sign which reads 'Putting Area'. The way to dispose of this boy is obscurity at its worst: the idea is to input the words 'Pudding Section' to clear-up the putting area and reveal a line of ants which of course will transform into bustling ladies when the player types in the word Aunts. A tantrum throwing little girl appears at one point, the ribbon in her hair carries the words 'worst brat', if the player is getting into the swing of the game then it will soon dawn that to change her into something more manageable he must type in 'Bratwurst', which, as we all know, is a sausage and much easier to deal with than a little girl.

I didn't enjoy this game, no atmosphere no excitement just lots of experimenting with words, very dull. Its links with the adventuring world are very tenuous indeed and I hope Infocom don't make Nord And Bert a precedent... I shan't vote for either of them.