Infocom, in its heyday, produced some games the likes of which has never been seen since, either because there's no perceived interest in such games (the mysteries in particular) or because amateur IF writers don't have access to the proper technology (the more graphical games). Neither of those objections necessarily applies to Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of it, a wordplay game, but Nick Montfort's Ad Verbum is arguably the first free- or shareware IF game to follow in Nord and Bert's footsteps. (Dennis Cunningham's T-Zero had some points in common, but there was more going on than wordplay--pop culture references and such.) Ad Verbum is a worthy successor: like Nord and Bert, not all of it is particularly inspired, but the moments that work really, really work.

The plot, again like Nord and Bert, is simply an excuse for wordplay puzzles--you're looking through the Wizard of Wordplay's mansion and moving through various rooms that are devoted to specific types of wordplay, thereby to collect objects. Many of the puzzles are a bit obscure, and some are only tangentially related to wordplay--or, rather, involve forms of wordplay that aren't necessarily familiar to anyone but the most hardened of GAMES magazine addicts. (One puzzle that involves moving a sofa down a flight of stairs is particularly baffling to those not on the author's wavelength.) Another, involving a little boy who's a dinosaur fan, I found simply misleading--at least, the solution suggested in the hints was something of a surprise to me.

The heart of the game, however, lies on the "initial" floor of the house: there are passages lying to the north, east, west, and south, and going north yields this: 

"LISTEN WELL!" a sonorous voice booms out, in attempted hollowness. "Know ye
that passage back through here is difficult for some, impossible for others!
Should you wish to transport yourself - without your cherished possessions -
out of these constrained confines, utter the magic command: NEW!"

Neat Nursery
Nice, nondescript nursery, noticeably neat. Normally, nurslings nestle
noisily. Now, none. No needful, naive newborns.

Nearby: ... nifty nappy.
The parser, as you might have guessed, has been rewritten to require that every word of every command begin with N. Violating the rules elicits "No! No! Negative, novice. Nasty notation." or "No! No! Nefarious nomenclature. Narrate nicely, now." The NEW command mentioned above is your only way of getting out of the room: RESTORE, QUIT and everything else has been disabled. Needless to say, in the rooms to the east, west and south, the parser has been similarly reworked for the appropriate letter. You have a goal for each room--extracting some objects and getting out of the room, using only the appropriate letters--but even after the goal is accomplished, it's worth hanging around to experiment with the alliterative parser. The results are more often than not hilarious, as with the following: 
>nip nappy
Naughty, naughty! Nibbling nappies not normal.
Or: 
>examine effigy
Enemy effigy. Extreme enormity evident. Execrable evildoer!
There's plenty more amusing stuff in each room: the parser-rewriting was done with plenty of intelligence and wit. (WAIL in the appropriate room elicits "Waaaah!", which amuses me no end for some reason.) In short: nicely notated, Nick! Erudite, esoteric effusions entertain endlessly. Winsome, witty wizardry will woo wordsmiths, who will whisper "Wow!" without wearying. Surely, such semantic skill should solicit stratospheric scores.

There are some variants on the alliterative parser--another S room with another restriction, and a room with objects whose content suggests that the proper TAKE replacement for each object will involve letter-avoidance of one sort or another. (There was a nasty bug in the competition version of this room that has been squashed--naturally, the game in the updated version reports a literal squashed bug.) The parser is not, however, rewritten for each object, so most of the fun of the alliterative rooms is lost, and only the wordplay puzzle remains. It's a fine puzzle, of course, but it doesn't have the same effect. The other puzzles are likewise not nearly as inspired--there's a "twin bedroom" that requires that all commands be in the form >HAMMER HAMMER, but there isn't nearly as much room for experimenting there.

To the extent that Ad Verbum works--and it depends mostly, I think, on the extent to which the player is amused by the alliterative rooms--it works for different reasons than Nord and Bert worked. The latter called for all sorts of cleverness from the player, and getting through it produced a real feeling of accomplishment; some of the puzzles were quite difficult. In particular, certain scenarios required that the player deploy various clichés or idioms, often in amusingly twisted ways, to get through the scene--and not a small amount of creativity was required. Ad Verbum doesn't ask nearly as much of the player--the most difficult feat of wordplay is clearly coming up with the appropriate alliterative words, and in most rooms that's not especially difficult. (Getting out of the N room is a challenge--sufficiently obscure that if you go in there without first encountering the fellow who wanders around dropping hints, you're unlikely to get it--but the others are pretty straightforward.) But the author here has put his own skills on display, much more so than the Nord and Bert authors did, and the result is just as amusing. In other words, the fun is more passive here than it was in Nord and Bert--the interactivity isn't as important--but there's still fun to be had.

Ad Verbum is not an unqualified success; without the alliterative parser, I don't think there'd be much interesting about it. But I got enough laughs out of those rooms that I can't give it anything less than a 9.