Review: Rex Nebular
by Joshua D. Rothman

Type: Adventure
Publisher: MicroProse
Retail Price: $69.95
Mail Order: $39.95
Requires: System 6.07 or later; 4 MB RAM; 12 MB hard disk space; 256-color video; 32-bit QuickDraw; High-density floppy drive
Protection: Manual

For a publisher who’s never before released an adventure game, MicroProse has really taken some chances with Rex Nebular, The Cosmic Gender Bender. The game is a “for mature audiences only” adventure — it contains (and its humor is based upon) some rather silly but nonetheless adult graphics and concepts that younger children wouldn’t understand.  Rex Nebular is not the kind of game you want to give to your six-year-old as an introduction to computer gaming. It even goes beyond Leisure Suit Larry.

Nice or Naughty? The game’s storyline can be switched between two levels of “adultness”:  “Naughty,” which is the default setting, gives the game about an R rating, and “Nice” gives the game a  PG-13. As an example, in the beginning of the game you can look at your ship’s viewscreen and see a nude woman walking down the beach if you’re in Naughty mode. In Nice mode, however, the picture fills with static before anything inappropriate can appear. The game also features a “Nice (Locked)” feature which presumably lets a parent lock out a child from viewing the more adult scenes.

Another innovative feature is the use of a high speed — almost simulation speed — graphics engine to display 3-D rotoscoped graphics. Even on a lowly LC the graphics run five to ten times faster than Sierra’s adventures, and the movement is VERY smooth. The characters appear to be real, and the movements attain a fluidity reminiscent of Out of this World. Because of the graphics engine, the game switches screens much faster — you don’t have to worry about the slow changes that are the hallmark of other adventure games.  

The graphics really come out in the introduction and ending, which show incredibly smooth 3-D graphics (mostly ships) flying around your screen at incredible speeds with no jumping. The introduction is a whopping FIFTEEN minutes long, and the game requires only 12 megabytes of disk space. MicroProse has produced an incredible graphic storage and retrieval system.

 
From the director of “Invasion of the Cabbage Heads!”  The thing that knocks Rex Nebular down is the story. In adventure games the story is the most important part, and here Rex falls hard.

In Rex Nebular you step into the role of swaggering adventurer Rex Nebular,who roams the galaxy in his starship, the Slippery Pig, and then finds work with a Colonel Stone, who is rich enough to own an entire moon (and does!). Colonel Stone is apparently anguished over the loss of a precious vase he played with as a child. The vase was stolen from his family and taken to the planet of Terra Androgena, which disappeared mysteriously some years ago. Using the meager mind-power at his disposal, Rex reasons that it’s easier to hide a planet than to move it. He takes off for the last known coordinates of Terra Androgena. When he arrives in orbit, a large ship decloaks behind him and blasts him out of orbit. He crash-lands in a lagoon on the surface.

This is where you (Rex) take over. Throughout the game, you must first escape from your ship and leave the lagoon, figure out how to operate the teleporter devices that you use to traverse the game, explore the city of Machopolis, make explosives, and find Buck Naked’s security ID.  

The real problem with this story is that it’s unfocused — the central plot isn’t pervasive enough in the game to keep the player’s interest. If the story were improved, even to the B-movie levels of some of the Space Quest series, the game would be much more enjoyable.  

Game Play.  Rex Nebular employs the familiar interface used by LucasArts in Monkey Island with a few additions. For those of you not familiar with the interface, it is a step up from the parser (text-based) interface used by Sierra in the mid-80s.  At the bottom of the screen are several verbs, usually things like look, take, put, push, pull, etc., and a list of inventory items.  You can form “sentences” with these words:  “Put the bottle into the chest,” or “Take the gun.” 

You move throughout the world by clicking the mouse on “hot spots” on the screen. The text at the bottom of the view window will change depending on where you’re pointing: point at a teleporter and you'll see “Enter teleporter.”

That’s great!  For a first foray into adventure gaming, the game has some really nice touches. The game comes with a hilarious log book that I really loved. The game itself lets you set startup prefs so that when the game starts the desktop can be hidden or shown and the menu bar can be present or invisible. Screen fades and many other options can be chosen from an options menu. Another nifty feature is a “Resume last game” feature at the main menu which lets you just open your old game without browsing through tons of them looking for the one you used last. Finally, the game has three difficulty levels, so it shouldn’t be too easy or too hard for anyone.

Sheesh That’s Annoying!  First of all, Rex has no Macintosh manual. Instead, you get a Macintosh “Quick Support Guide.”  Sure, it’s just barely adequate, but I’d really have preferred a real manual. The folks at MicroProse say that the PC manual works for both the PC and the Mac. Well, I hate be the one to break the news to them, but Macs don’t have three-button mice, and you don’t have to type a:\install to load the game. The font Rex Nebular uses is very VERY tiny and hard to read, and the text isn’t outlined, making it hard to read some messages or speech. Furthermore, there are no character close-ups, and the text on the screen rarely differs for two characters, so it’s easy to mistake one character’s speech for another’s.

All In All. Rex Nebular may not be the greatest game to come along in years, but for a first try it’s a good product, despite the dismal plot. It breaks some new ground, both in software technology and in theme. It successfully establishes MicroProse in the adventure gaming genre. 

Pros
• Excellent graphics
• Some really good extra features
• Fairly simple interface
• Selectable difficulty

Cons
• No music
• Half-baked story
• Doesn’t keep the player’s interest for the entire game