A review of
A ship enters from out of nowhere and heads toward an asteroid. It lands and an man emerges and walks down a path, watched from above. After an incident of gracefulness, the man makes it to the desk of the person who was watching him. We finally see our hero...
REX NEBULAR
He tells the man watching him, Col. Stone, about his experience on his latest mission. The entire game is a flashback of Rex's recent episode on Terra Androgena. Rex tells about the trouble he had getting to the hidden planet past the all feminine war ship. Rex narrowly escapes death and crashes on the surface. He must make his way to the surface and find a way off the jungle part of the plant he is stuck on, not to mention finding a way off the planet, since his ship is a little more that decommissioned. He has to deal with hungry plants, a clepto monkey, a big behemoth bertha who is anything but bulimic, a stubborn female local, a violent female local, and that's just on this part of the planet.
When Rex makes it away from this section of the planet, he is transported
right into the waiting hands of some heavily armed females. They
lock him up, and you can let your imagination go wild here as to what a
planet of women has in store for our hero.
I don't want to give away too much of the game, play it if you get the chance.
I will comment on all the other parts of the game. Besides the storyline, the graphics are probably the second most important part of any game, though I will probably get some argument here. Given the fact that this is a 6 year old game (Nov. 1992), this is one of the best looking games I have seen. I was very impressed by the detail of everything, especially the characters. When they move, it looks realistic. They aren't moving there feet like mad and only moving a small amount. There are rotating items in the inventory, and a detailed view of each object when you look at them. The map in the car in the city was also very impressive, as was the teleporter scenes when Rex is pushing buttons. The color technology is also very impressive. All of the pictures are in 256 colors, but the graphics are an advanced-256. To verify, screen capture a picture and then convert it to 256 colors.
The programming is also the best I have ever seen, as far as compatibility. I have a problem getting NEW games to work with my sound card, but Rex Nebular sounded just fine. The install program gave me options as far as what additional items I could configure. There was the rotating inventory, and animated item background, and a few other things. It then warned me if I didn't have enough free memory and suggested I change certain options in order to fix the problem, though I could still run the game and it ususally worked anyway. The warnings were there just in case there was a problem. I played the game all the way through before I even looked at the system requirements. 286/16, 640K RAM. 640K!!!! I found that hard to believe. Amazing. The game never crashed on me. I had to try to make it crash (when messing with cheat options) to find out about the autosave feature. I don't know of any other game at that time that included one of those, and it even worked when it crashed, not just as convience to resume your last game. The game also had a retry feature if you died. It's not easy to die, but you can. It's not like if you pick up a thumbtack you cut yourself and bleed to death, or getting some strange disease from eating a berry on an alien planet in the beginning of a game and not dying until just before the end of the game. There was no where to get stuck in the game. If you use and item wrong, and you don't have anymore of that item, you can go find it somewhere else. Hey Sierra, are you been taking notes? (Obviously not, but they should be!)
I found the game challenging and very funny. I did not get stuck in any part but also I didn't think any part of the game was too easy. I do have a lot of experience playing graphic adventures, and I would have to say that this is one of the best. When software advances just as fast as hardware and people only want the newest and best, a six year old game that I would rather play shows just how much fun it is. The game, besides having a great story line, had many little things to make it fun. Names of products and places such as Buckluster Video, Durafail batteries, Polyester Suit Peter, Sahara Off-line, etc. In the video store, you can look at the action movies, look at the dramas, look at the comedies, and stare at the pornos. Did you notice the blinking sign on the Pleasure Dome? Just about everything has a witty description if you look at it, and Rex always has something nice to say to just about everything. "Greetings chicken bomb." "Greetings dead fish." You get the idea.
This is a very adult game, but there are two levels the game can be played at, naughty or nice. The game can be locked nice if parents want to let there kids play it, or if they themselves don't think they can handle the perversions and numerous innuendos in the game.
The puzzles all made sence, except for the chicken bomb, but they acknowldege that fact when you do it. You aren't asked to pick and electronic lock with a toothpick or get past a guard with a pencil and a shipping invoice.
Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender is an excellent game, containing all the elements of an award winning and very entertaining graphic adventure.
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