Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender

The Good
In the early 90's, MicroProse introduced us to a Space Quest rip-off called Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender. As far as I know, it is the third adventure game that they created after Dragonsphere and Return of the Phantom. In this game, space guy Rex Nebular is asked by Capt. Stone to get a precious vase that can only be found on an non-existent planet. If he returns to Stone with the vase with him, he will get 75,000 galactars. Getting this item will be dangerous, as he will encounter beautiful but deadly women who have a personal vendetta against men, and have a need to continue their race using a machine known as the Gender Bender. A ship shoots your "Slippery Pig" down onto a planet, and you land underwater.

You start your adventure inside the Pig. The interface for this game is found at the bottom of the screen, and nearly occupies half of the screen. The first half consists of several LucasArts-style commands such as Open, Talk to, Push, and Pull, while the other half consists of your inventory (in its rotated state). Clicking on whatever inventory item that you have will bring up a few miscellaneous commands that allow you to manipulate them. The ability to manipulate items like this is not often present in many adventure games. The background of the interface consists of moving pictures, which change to reflect what environment that you are in. Occasionally, a plane will fly across the interface, with a banner saying "Eat at Joe's" on it. Moving backgrounds are not present in the adventure games that I have played and completed so far, and I found them a nice feature to look at. The extra features, including the spinning objects and the moving backgrounds, are memory intensive and are not required to complete the game. So if you are using these and you receive an "Out of Memory" error message, you might want to turn these things off, either via the setup program or in the game itself.

The graphics in this game are good, but they have not got that Sierra feel to them when they are compared to games that came out at the same time, including Space Quest IV and King's Quest V. Some of the music in the game have a similar feel to the music that you hear on the summary screens in Where in Space is Carmen Sandiego? Deluxe Edition. The MPU-401 sound module is supported, though I did not notice a huge difference in the sound - either it was too quiet or it sounded crap to me.

The Bad
There are sound effects in the game, but these are very basic, and they don't reflect the sound that is supposed to be heard. Seriously, most of the sound effects in Rex Nebular sound like as if a person is playing an instrument for about three seconds, then stops.

The Bottom Line
Rex Nebular is a good game, though not quite as good as the SQ games from Sierra. However, Rex Nebular has four endings, whereas the SQ games only manage with one ending. The ending that you see will vary from game to game, depending on what you do. There is only one perfect ending, and this ending is quite funny. The rest of the endings only deal with deaths.

The Good
Take two parts Leisure Suit Larry, one part Space Quest and then make everything far more raunchy and politically incorrect than Sierra would ever dare to and there you have Rex Nebular, a humorous point-and-click adventure game by Microprose.

In this game you get casted in the shoes of (you guessed it) Rex Nebular, a space-faring dork who goes around the galaxy picking out odd-jobs and trying to make ends meet. Essentially a dorkish Han Solo sans Chewy, but far closer to Larry than to Roger Wilco. As the game starts you get commissioned by a space magnate to find some sort of vase in a lost planet, you crash into it, and soon find out that the planet is populated only by women... YeeHaaw!!! Party Time! Right??? Wrong, as you'll find out soon enough, this isn't Duke Nukem in Land of the Babes, and pretty much all the chicks in the game are uptight ultra-feminist trigger-happy mamas. It's up to you then to survive the ahem hostile world of Terra Androgena and escape with your life and the vase. Got it? Good.

Now as a story that's pretty much run-of-the-mill, but as I mentioned early this is a humorous game, so the story is merely an excuse to set up the gags and main direction of the jokes in this game. And you have to admit that when you take Rex "Himbo" Nebular and pit him against a group of feminazis the results are, even if expected, quite hilarious. The sense of humor in this game is certainly politically incorrect and very edgy, the game focuses on cartoony reactions of life-like characters, scatological escapades, and general juvenilia. You won't find smart and sarcastic remarks or witty verbal sparrings in this game, and there's simply nothing wrong with that. This isn't "Monthy Python" or "Spinal Tap", this is "There's Something about Mary" and as long as you understand that then you are going to find out that Rex Nebular is a riot to play. It is wacky enough and immature enough to capitalize on all its potential and has a lot of hilarious moments and situations that add a lot of charm.

The gameplay uses a typical Scumm-ish engine to allow you to explore the gameworld and solve the various puzzles in the game, which are to be fair rather easy but clever and very well laid out.

Technically speaking the game was also a major achievement, with crudely digitized characters (that were nonetheless a wonder to behold) beautiful, detailed graphics and smooth animation, heck the game even boasted digitized speech for some sequences and 3D rendered animations!

The Bad
There is pretty much nothing to hate about Rex Nebular other than Rex Nebular itself :). I mean, if you don't like the type of crude, in-your-face, politically incorrect humor this game has then you are screwed. If you only find funny the wacky cutesy cartoony or the smartly sarcastic then you are not gonna get much out of this game since the story itself is not too exciting and there are pretty much no interesting characters other than Rex himself.

The Bottom Line
A truly hilarious adventure that also happens to be a very well made classical adventure game. Just be sure you are in the right "tune" for this game. This game is much closer to Larry than Monkey Island or Space Quest, but then again it's also much more raunchier than Larry and more edgier too. It's up to you really. Can you laugh about stuff like Machopolis, repeated sex changes and a fat chick that kills you by slamming her fat ass on you?

If you do, then you should give Rex a try. It's a cool game, and besides nowadays nothing like it could ever be made without P.E.T.A., N.O.W., Dykes on Bikes or whoever spitting on it for it's "offensive" nature.

The Good
I liked quite a bit, really. The graphics, while nothing spectacular in today's terms, were cool back then, since the characters looked more "real". Also, the humor in this game is up there with the best around, and kept a smile on my face the whole time. The puzzles, while not overtly hard, are tough enough to make you think for a while. I suppose the best part about this game is its "spirit"...that is, I got a feeling from this game that was wholly unique and enjoyable. It wasn't a "LucasArts game" or a "Sierra game", it stood on its own. This game had it all, and still stands on my top 5 of all time.

The Bad
Well, like any good game, you don't want it to end. There are also some "lonely" segments of the game, where you don't really interact with any other characters. But this doesn't detract from the whole experience in any way.

The Bottom Line
An adventure game for the ages. Up there with the best LucasArts, Sierra, and Access have to offer. You'll laugh, you'll cry, and play it over and over. An underrated classic if there ever was one.