Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender

Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender is a 1992 point-and-click adventure game, developed and published by MicroProse. It was the first such adventure game that MicroProse ever developed; it's 256-color MicroProse Adventure Development system would be used for only two adventure titles under the studio's umbrella (Return of the Phantom and Dragonsphere), before being sold to Sanctuary Woods. A Macintosh version of the game was released in 1993.

Featuring relatively gratuitous amounts of sex and violence for its time, Rex Nebular contained video games' first parental-control system, with a "Naughty" version (comparable to an R-rated motion picture), a "Nice" version (PG-13), and a "Locked Nice" version (when selected, the game cannot be set to the "Naughty" version without completely re-installing the game).

Plot

Rex Nebular is a clumsy space "hero", who somehow manages to dig himself into black hole after black hole, but always escapes by the skin of his teeth. A cross between Space Quest's Roger Wilco and Star Wars' Han Solo, Rex is not as noble as Han, and not conscious of his foibles like Roger. After somehow surviving mishap after mishap, Nebular beats a hasty retreat in his beloved spaceship, the Slippery Pig, in search of his next adventure / romantic conquest.

Gameplay

Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender is a 256-color VGA-graphic point-and-click adventure game of the early 1990s, and shares many of the characteristics of the popular adventure titles of the day from Sierra and LucasArts. The interface features a list of commands and an inventory in the lower part of the screen throughout the playable portions of the game, while the environments have a variety of clickable elements for players to interact with and explore. The left mouse button performs the most likely command to be used on a particular element of the environment, while the right mouse button can be defined by the user with a particular command (the default setting for the right mouse button is the "Look" command).

Rex Nebular was the first adventure game to have item-specific commands; once collected, most items in the inventory would have unique commands by which players could use the item in specific ways. For example, once collected, a player looking at a scalpel in their inventory would see additional commands, such as "Sharpen", "Cut", and "Stab". The game was also the first to have an animated inventory item display, provided the player had a computer with enough available memory to run the game at its most demanding graphics settings.

It was possible for the player to die in Rex Nebular, unlike most LucasArts adventure releases. However, unlike Sierra's requirement to restore a previously saved game following death, Rex would perform an animated death sequence, fade out, and fade back in at the same location, essentially rewinding the game for the player to try again. Also unlike LucasArts' titles (but like most Sierra adventure games), Rex Nebular could have unwinnable states that the player could generate on the game's higher difficulty levels.

Like other adventure games of the era, Rex supported a variety of sound cards, such as the popular Sound Blaster card and the premium Roland MT-32 sound module.