Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender

Moby ID: 539
DOS Specs
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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: 72% (based on 17 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.7 out of 5 (based on 30 ratings with 4 reviews)

MicroProse's answer to Space Quest

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.

DOS · by Katakis | カタキス (43092) · 2005

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 6, 1999. Last modified January 20, 2024.