is murderously hostile until the player "leaves the cook to his own devices" and "gores his ox". "Act the Part" - the player must take part in a 50s-style sitcom and perform visual gags and bits of slapstick comedy, including giving someone a "hotfoot" and playing along with knock-knock jokes. "Manor of Speaking" - this chapter takes place in a house filled with bizarre rooms. Although this section has several puzzles reminiscent of Infocom's "straightforward" interactive fiction games, they are played for surreal humor. As an example: a room called The Kremlin has a talking portrait of Karl Marx. The player must wind a clock and place it inside a box, and then enter the Kremlin. The portrait of Marx assumes that the ticking box is a bomb and falls off the wall, revealing a safe which can be opened using the clock's "winding" key. "Shake a Tower" - this section ties a number of situations into an absurd story using spoonerisms. The tangled phrase can be entered by itself, such as "pretty girl" for "gritty pearl". Sometimes certain actions must be performed first, such as feeding stones to set up the change from "fed rocks" to a "red fox". "Meet the Mayor" - the final chapter can only be played after the rest of the game has been successfully completed. Elements of many of the preceding sections are mixed here as the player tries to convince Punster's mayor to sign a law. Some puzzle solutions are phrases that are merely hinted at by the surroundings, such as "Possession is nine-tenths of the law" or "taking something under false pretenses." Release The Nord and Bert packaging includes Home on the Range, a physical booklet of wordplay-themed cartoons drawn by Kevin Pope (who also illustrated the front and back of the game package). The cartoons illustrate several of the types of puzzles in the game, with each cartoon corresponding to a section of the game. Reception Computer Gaming Worlds reviewer did not enjoy Nord and Bert as much as the "more complete" previous Infocom games, stating that the game often did not accept seemingly valid word play responses. He suggested that the game might be used to teach word play to students. Compute! more favorably reviewed the game, praising its humor, the puzzles' creativity, and the fact that individual games could be finished in a brief period. Compute!'s Gazette also liked