Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender

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Description official descriptions

The interstellar pilot and Casanova-wannabe Rex Nebular is hired by Colonel Stone for a hefty sum to travel to a distant planet and retrieve a vase that supposedly holds great sentimental value to him. On the way Rex's ship is attacked and he crash-lands on a mysterious planet. Further inspection reveals that this planet is inhabited solely by women; in a terrible war between sexes, the female population annihilated the male one with biological weapons, and is now artificially procreating with a device called the Gender Bender. Rex is soon captured by the planet's cruel elite forces and must find a way to escape while preserving his virility.

Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender is a puzzle-solving adventure game with light erotic and comedy elements, somewhat influenced by Leisure Suit Larry and Space Quest series. The interface resembles the one used in most LucasArts games of the time period: the player chooses verbs from a menu at the bottom on the screen, interacting with objects on screen. Some collected items have their own, unique actions that can be performed with them that are not available on a general list of possible actions. Most of the puzzles are inventory-based. The game is linear but some goals may be achieved in different ways. There is no way to get stuck - the game does not allow the player to progress further beyond specific moments without all the needed objects or actions. Three difficulty levels are available what makes some puzzles more or less complex - in the easiest difficult level some actions are not required or/and some objects may not exist at all.

The game has four different endings and only one of them is a happy one. The endings depend on the actions the player did (or did not do) in the final section of the game.

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Credits (DOS version)

74 People · View all

Designed by
Lead Programmer / Technical Director
Executive Producer
Produced by
Art Director
Music
Game text / comedic consultant
Painting
Animation
Applications programming
Sound Programming
Voice Track Editor
Rex's Log text
Manual Text
Manual Design & Layout
Q.A. Management
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 71% (based on 16 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.7 out of 5 (based on 29 ratings with 4 reviews)

Rex Nebular kicks Roger Wilco's ass anytime, anywhere.

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.

DOS · by Zovni (10504) · 2002

Not for swinging, hip, gender-benders, but not bad

The Good
There's lots to like in this game. It's quite short, and the puzzles are easy, and logical, so if you play it with a walkthrough you can complete it at a single sitting (if, like me, that's the way you like to play adventure games). The last 'puzzle', which involved filling an underground city with seawater was very cool.

The Bad
Two things: the plot seemed lop-sided. The zany title and cover art suggested a racy, comic adventure involving lots of scantily clad women and sexual shenanigans. It doesn't. In fact the gender-bender thing is irrelevant, to the point where it just seems like a sales gimmick, and far from being comical the overall feel of the game is rather serious and involves rescuing a vase (yawn).

Of course as a red-blooded male I'd have liked to have seen Microprose develop the 'landing on a planet of sex-starved women' plot angle a little more, but perhaps that was too obvious, which is why they just stuck to rescuing the vase (yawn).

The other thing was the music: wailing theremin-type atonal sci-fi cliche.

The Bottom Line
Don't get me wrong I liked this game. It is pleasing and enjoyable for all its flaws, and I'll probably play it again sometime.

DOS · by jossiejojo (37) · 2005

The best game you never played.

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.

DOS · by Toka (13) · 2001

[ View all 4 player reviews ]

Trivia

Audio Logs

In addition to the already humorous manual the game originally came with Rex's "voice-activated auto-transcribing audio log" (actually a transcript of said log). This 20-plus page fiction gave a deeper insight into Rex, and described the events that led him to Terra Androgena in much more detail that in the opening sequence.

Written by Steve Meretzky, the log was also pretty funny to read, with highlights like reading an entry where he goes on and on about how exited he is about his new log and how he's gonna make an entry every single day, only to read that his next entry is a year later and reads "what the hell is this piece of junk?

Bugs

The game is rather bugs-free, however there is a nasty one by the end of the game. Spoiler alert - when you make bombs make sure that you DO NOT make chicken bomb until the city is flooded. The game seems to check if you have "chicken" item in your inventory before you place the first bomb (timebomb) and "chicken bomb" will not count as such and the game will not let you continue.

If you had 4 megabyte (or more) memory in your PC, items in your inventory would spin instead of standing still.

Endings

There appears to be four (4) possible endings to Rex Nebular: - The "A Quick Death" ending - The "Honorable Death" ending - The "Victory!" ending, and - The "Decompression" ending

The First of Many!

Rex Nebular was the first game that Sid Meier protege Brian Reynolds worked on with MicroProse.

MADS engine

Rex Nebular was prominently advertized as the first game to use the MADS engine (MicroProse Adventure Development System......SCUMM anyone?) used in other games like Dragonsphere.

Information also contributed by Garcia, Nakre Nakresson, Indra was here, and PCGamer77

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by OnlyBlue.

Linux added by Sciere. Windows added by lights out party. Macintosh added by Terok Nor.

Additional contributors: jeff leyda, Zovni, Jeanne, mailmanppa.

Game added December 6th, 1999. Last modified September 30th, 2023.