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. Most of the puzzles are inventory-based. Three difficulty levels are available.
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 were 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.
