Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender

Playing through Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender (with a walkthrough) wasn’t too bad. There were times when the game became annoying or tiresome, but I mostly enjoyed it anyway. POSITIVES The graphics are well-made and add considerable realism to an otherwise far-fetched story. However, the image resolution is relatively low (compared to modern-day games), so viewing the game window fullscreen isn’t quite as pleasing. The soundtrack is a bit low-grade and dated, but it’s actually enjoyable to listen to. I wouldn’t add the sountrack to my iPod (if I could), but I didn’t turn it off either. The interface is very sophisticated and not too clumsy. I found myself liking it more than the interfaces of most other inventory-intensive adventure games, and it’s almost as good as some of the better RPG games of this era. There are quite a few ways in which the player character can abruptly die, but (thank goodness) the game doesn’t force the player to restore a gamesave. Instead, it merely returns the character to the previous screen unharmed. When I played through this game, I saved it frequently, but I only had to use the gamesaves a couple of times. As a warning, be sure…

Fun, classic point and click adventure. Even though I love this kind of old adventure games, I found this one a little archaic for its time and convoluted from time to time, like not very clear with what you have to do to advance. But at the worst moments I used the hint book provided by this Steam release, and could advance without spoiling the entire puzzles nor the fun. If you can get in the right state of mind and played other more classic adventure games, maybe you'll enjoy it. If not, you can totally skip it.

This is an ancient Sierra "Quest"/Monkey Island style point and click adventure with an adult/science fiction/comedy theme where you help a space adventurer through a series of puzzles. As far as games go, this is just too old. The game runs in DOSBOX and displays 4:3 aspect ratio, with very low resolution graphics. This would only be of interest to gamers who had played the game previously and wanted to buy it for a second time for the sake of nostalgia. And Nightdive are obliging... by gouging people $10 for a 28 year old game. There's no way I could recommend anyone pays that much for this abandonware.

I'd like to call this game a gem, one in a series starring a long-forgotten point-and click mascot who got dreamed up out of the ether and needs his day of acknowledgement and reappraisal, but that's only partially true. This game's general design is pretty fantastic and feels way ahead of its time. The eerie electronic music combined with the realistic rotoscoped graphics makes for a "futuristic old" type of experience, you know, when a game looks dated and cutting edge at the same time. Really the only places the game falters is in some of the design, and not even in the way you might expect. Microprose made the mistake of having three difficulty settings, and while this might have been intended to make the game more accessible, it actually makes it more confoundingly difficult. This is a huge game with around 30+ different maps that you can access almost all at once at one point, with little clue as to what to do next. Factor in that you have multiple commands and can interact with everything from the sky to individual air vents, and you're looking at probably hundreds of thousands of combinations- you aren't brute forcing this game. Even still, the puzzles are simplistic, but …

This should actually be a neutral review. The game is a quite nice point and click with decent(yet cliche) story, OK puzzles and a lot of humour(sometimes controversial for today's standards). All in the flavour of the classic 90s titles. Why in that case, I don't recommend it? Mainly because the controls aged poorly and it contains quite a lot of slow, repetitive transitions. In few scenarios the game also requires using quite specific action to accomplish a goal. By that I don't mean any weird of abstract puzzles(not counting the classical humorous, yet still logical solutions), more that it added a bunch of often similar interactions to the menu and only one of them works, while others fail to give a meaningful response, that is if they give one at all. If you're accustomed to the mechanics of the old P&C games, you might still find it enjoyable, especially for the humour, otherwise you will probably find it too dated, maybe even clunky. There are many titles from that era(some even slightly older then Rex Nebular) which are more accessible Advice for people still willing to give it a shot: When looking/using any other command you can keep the mouse button pressed and will see…

MicroProse <3 NightDive