Microprose is a lot more
famous for its strategy games than for its adventures. I consider Microprose’s
Civilization  (created by Sid Meier) to be one of the most
entertaining computer games of all time. And there were others, Colonization
or Master of Orion to name two of them. But we’re interested
in adventure games and one of Microprose’s best is Rex Nebular and
the Cosmic Gender-Bender. That’s a mouthful of a name – from now
on I’ll refer to the game simply as Rex Nebular.

Rex
Nebular, the protagonist of the game, is a space hero – although he
is more of a hero in the style of Roger Wilco than Captain Kirk. We
meet Rex in an unusually long animated introduction sequence as he
lands a small spacecraft on an asteroid city at some point in the
future (this is a sci-fi game). Rex goes to visit someone called Colonel
Stone, apparently a very rich and very powerful person. To this Colonel
Stone Rex then gives a priceless vase and asks for his finder’s fee,
75,000 galactars. If this doesn’t sound like the beginning of a story,
that’s because it isn’t. But please keep reading.

Stone ask Rex if it was easy to get the vase. Rex seems offended
and starts telling the whole story from the beginning. The vase was
supposed to be on a cloaked (i.e. invisible) planet. Finding the planet
was easy for Rex using a mass detector. But after Rex launched a small
probe from his ship (his ship was called “Slippery Pig”), a large
warship suddenly decloaks and immediately opens fire at Rex’s ship.
Rex tries to open a communications channel and talk his way out of
the mess. The warship is manned exclusively by women (is that a pun
or what?) and the ladies aren’t impressed by Rex’s claim that he is
“only a tourist”. Another salvo from the warship’s laser cannons (or
plasma guns? or phasers? I honestly couldn’t tell) shatters the Slippery
Pig and the torso of the ship plummets towards the planet. Fortunately
for Rex, the living quarters of Slippery Pig were designed with safety
in mind and survive the long fall, finally landing in the sea very
near shore (so Rex won’t even have to swim too far).

This is where the introduction ends – I said it was long. And not
only that, it also sports several 3D rendered sequences and what’s
more, it talks! While that doesn’t sound terribly impressive today,
we’re talking about a game released in 1992 and published on ten floppies.
Does that sound better?

Now that the introduction is over, the adventure starts – but first
you have to pass the copy protection test and make a few important
choices. The first choice concerns the game difficulty – Novice, Advanced
or Expert. The same locations and objects are available at all difficulty
levels but when playing the easier levels, not all objects need to
be used and the especially the Expert level presents a few more puzzles.
The other important choices are in the options menu where you can
configure various aspects of the game’s interface. You can also choose
whether you want to have a Nice or Naughty storyline. I have to confess
that I never played the Nice version so I can’t comment on the differences
between these two. But I guess there aren’t many. Probably some of
Rex’s entirely innocent comments that might be misconstrued by certain
people to contain some sort of hidden naughty meaning were deleted.

Once you’ve made your selections on the game style, Rex’s adventure
finally starts. Rex is in Slippery Pig (or rather what little is left
of it) about 20 feet under water and the ship doesn’t seem to be in
a very good shape. Not that it ever was in a great shape (as evidenced
by toxic burgers in the fridge or incredibly messy bedroom), but it
is clear that this was Slippery Pig’s final voyage and Rex will have
to find some other means of transportation if he ever wants to leave
the planet – after recovering the precious vase of course.

It doesn’t take Rex long to collect the few useful looking object
from the shipwreck and get ashore. The countryside resembles Africa,
with lush grassland, palm trees and a forest. In the forest there
is a small village of stick huts and there Rex meets a young and rather
striking (OK, I’m just guessing, it’s hard to tell at 320×200 resolution)
blonde woman. She asks Rex a lot of strange questions and doesn’t
want to believe him that he’s really a man. But after Rex answers
all her question satisfactorily, she suddenly becomes, shall we say,
very very friendly to him.

After this encounter Rex goes on to explore the rural countryside.
When he manages to foil a dangerous cannibal woman, Rex comes to a
clearing with several very high-tech looking devices, in sharp contrast
to the stick huts he’s seen so far. One of these devices is a teleporter
and of course Rex wants to see what’s on the other end. So he steps
inside and ends up in some sort of very modern looking underground
facility inhabited by, you guessed it, women only. Which wouldn’t
be quite so bad if they weren’t the of same kind as the women piloting
the warship that got Rex into this predicament.

The ladies immediately seize Rex, lock him up in a jail and promise
him very interesting and very painful scientific experiments. If you
want to find out how Rex escaped, you’ll have to play the game. But
I’m not telling any secret when I say that he did escape from the
jail, found the vase and left the planet. That’s how the game started
after all. You’ll also find out why the planet is inhabited only by
women and how they manage to survive without men. Oh, and you’ll also
find out about the Cosmic Gender-Bender.

Now let’s take a look at how the game works. The bottom part of the
screen is occupied by a panel similar to many older LucasArts games
– an inventory and a short list of verbs. Only Rex Nebular’s
inventory is a lot spiffier, with spinning 3D objects and all that.
Unlike these old LucasArts adventures however, Rex Nebular
doesn’t automatically describe items under the mouse cursor – at least
not by default (this setting can be changed). Instead, it uses the
kind of interface employed by many old Sierra games from the beginning
of the 1990’s: looking anywhere at the screen will give you a short
(or sometimes not so short) description of the object or a generic
description of the area. I miss this feature in newer games because
it gave you a better “feel” for the game and there were often hidden
hints in the descriptions. Not to mention that many of these descriptions
in Rex Nebular are pretty funny.

The graphics in Rex Nebular are about what you’d expect from
a 1992 game. Maybe a little better than that actually. The game runs
in 320×200 resolution with 256 colors as was usual at that time. But
the character of Rex is unusually well animated and has very smooth
movements.

The sound likewise shows its age. As I mentioned above, the introduction
sequence has voiceovers, although the rest of the game doesn’t (not
surprisingly). The sound quality isn’t very high, the samples had
to fit on floppies after all. The quality of the music very much depends
on the selected playback device and of course the standard SoundBlaster/AdLib
output isn’t all that impressive. But I’m not criticizing the game
creators – they had to work with what was available at the time and
it would be unfair to directly compare a 1992 game to 2002 games.

Puzzles in Rex Nebular are almost all inventory based. Because
the difficulty is player selectable, it is not possible to summarily
describe it. I would say that at Novice difficulty the game is fairly
easy overall and at the Expert level it’s quite tough. There are some
not entirely obvious puzzles but for the most part the solutions are
logical.

Overall, Rex Nebular is a cute old adventure. The artwork
is of course very 1992 but that’s nothing to criticize in a 1992 game.
What counts is that this a fun game – I found many of Rex’s remarks
and object and location descriptions very witty, even though not everyone
might like Rex’s kind of humor. But I did and that’s why Rex Nebular
and the Cosmic Gender-Bender gets an A- from me.

Final Grade: A-

System Requirements:
286/16
VGA, MCGA
Adlib, Soundblaster