Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender-Bender

[Anonymous No.3044623]

Anybody else play this as a kid? Now that I think about it I don't know what possessed my parents to buy it. I suppose my mother got a kick out of the humor... but she was totally fine with her 8/10 year-old son playing it too.

Honestly as a kid a lot of the humor was lost on me, I just liked trying to figure out the game and the setting was cool.

For those of you who don't know... You play as a bumbling bachelor named Rex Nebular in a sci-fi universe. It's a universe that reminds me of Futurama, honestly. You are sent to a planet to find precious vase for some guy but get shot down. As it turns out the planet is populated exclusively by women. Around a 100 years ago the sexes went to war in the "Great Gender War" and the women won with a virus that killed all the men, but it also rendered the women unable to have male children.

So they use a machine called the Gender Bender to temporarily change into men and procreate. Their society is divided into two castes: Keepers and (Breeding) Stock. The Keepers live underground and have advanced technology while the Stock are basically tribsemen(women) living in the stone age who the Keepers spy on and use for mating.


It's the only adventure game I had as a kid, so I can't compare it to others though. I think the artwork is nice and the puzzles are fair. All fairly logical I'd say. The text descriptions for "narrative" you get when you interact with stuff is pretty funny too.

Such as if you swim toward a mine and it goes off you get, "A fool and his torso are soon parted."

Apparently Rex Nebular sold poorly, which is unfortunate. I do wonder what a sequel would have been like. I also think it'd be a neat setting for a pen and paper game or something. Might take it by /tg/ in the near future and see what they think.

[Anonymous No.3044683]

I got this game from some steam bundle and I think it's pretty meh. The art is fine, but everything else is kinda stupid. The soundtrack is pretty awful, the ringing sound that plays during the first area literally sounds like ear infection.
I guess I'm just spoiled by LucasArts adventure games.

[Anonymous No.3044813]

>>3044683
I don't think the sound works right on modern systems, or else the version I played as a kid had different sound. I had the Macintosh version which was released a year later. I suspect though that it's just that when played through DOSbox on a modern computer the simulated midi functions don't work right.

This is more like what I remember: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8YaVVwWx6U


What adventure games have you played? I had this and I suppose I had Myst, but I never liked Myst.

[Anonymous No.3044865]

>>3044813
Dosbox really makes it sound like tinnitus, listen to this shit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWRMTcsOg9c
Those high pitched EEEEEEEEEEEEE sounds drive me nuts.

>What adventure games have you played?
Back when I was a kid I had only the games my older brother would provide to me, he got lots of pirated copies from his friends. He got us Monkey Island, Sam & Max, Day of The Tentacle, and Leisure Suit Larry. After playing Sam & Max my bar for adventure games was so high that I pretty much just ignored everything that didn't have that kind of a budget.

I'm sure I would had enjoyed Rex Nebular if I had played it when I was younger. The humor is pretty naughty and that's what horny little boys like, though by today's standard it's super mild. Rex Nebular has little bit too much of that infamous red herring adventure games are so well known for. Also lots of pixe hunting, those goddamn hanging binoculars blending on the walls etc.

[Anonymous No.3044891]

>>3044865
>Also lots of pixe hunting, those goddamn hanging binoculars blending on the walls etc.

Yeah, when I fired it up the other day that annoyed me a little. It's a lot better if you go into the settings and set the interface to "easy".

Of-course I remembered the game pretty well from my childhood so I didn't need to really look for anything.

One thing I do like about the 'rooms' though is that a lot of them are very detailed with the "look" action getting you a different and unique description of lots of different little nick-nacks. My favorite probably being looking at the ironing board in the Keeper base.

By todays standards it is pretty tame. Though even as a kid I don't recall ever really noting how "naughty" it was. Today what I like about the humor is just kind of the smart-ass tone.


I do still like this game a lot though, but if I try and imagine what a 'remake' of it today would be like I kind of cringe. I can see it being very preachy with the whole Gender War thing.

[Anonymous No.3045172]

You know, thinking about it, and having read some other reviews of this game, I think the problem it had was too little interaction.

I mean that there simply aren't enough NPC's. Most of the ones you do meet you'll have one conversation with and then never see them again. I think this game would have been funnier and more engaging if you spent a lot more of the time interacting with some of its weird characters. There'd be more opportunities for a little naughty humor and more of an actual narrative with an actual story.

As it stands, most of the game is you wondering around alone picking up items. You get some witty commentary with the little pop-up boxes when you look at and try to interact with objects, but that's it.

It probably could have been a bit of a longer game too.