Rex Nebular

I do have a "proper" post lined up from last weekend - Saturday in fact - but I figured it can wait one more day, given the foolish day it is. So let's talk trivial matters: the first Rex Nebular from MicroProse (preOrion)... and the last.

I bought this one on the cheap, even "at the time". There was a vidjagaym store next to the Nan's on the 59, now the delightfully-named "I-69". (You'll want to go just slightly further downtown for that sort of thing.) They specialised in stuff that was popular years before. As other purchases there go I bought Star Control 2, late in 1994, for not-much ($20 I think). The machine in question was a Tandy running Windows 3.10/.11. Rex would be one of several I got for the thing; I recall playing it not at the dorm, but at home, so probably summer '95.

I don't recall playing it much however. Spoilers ensue for anyone reading who cares.

Rex offers sex comedy in space, sticking between Sierra's and Infocom's extremes; like, PG-13. It is, basically, an attempt at Space Quest X without Wilco's (janitorial) lore. Those were the scenes in the time-travel caper of Sierra's (actual) SQ-IV back in 1991. MicroProse put this one out the following year. They thought that they could pad out "SQ-X"'s graphical Leather Goddesses homage/adaptation to a full game, and that a market existed for something like that.

For backstory the titular character is hired to pick up a macguffin at an uncharted planet; the planet's current rulers like it uncharted, so shoot down said character's ship. That planet's secret is a civil war between the sexes, not all that long back (maybe a generation ago) which the females won.

Etc etc etc, wildlife tries to kill Our Hero, two fortresses need infiltrating, Roger needs the macguffin - a vase.

When I played this back in 1995, or '94 or '96 (I don't even know) I viewed it inferior to the Andromeda Guys' effort, like a not-very-funny joke stretched too long. I remember that xes scene early on (there is one - just one); and I am pretty sure I got as far as the vehicle in the City Of Man (I won't spoil its name). Since then I'd forgotten how to solve what puzzles I'd solved, which turns out handy for replay. Honestly I forgot the very name of the game until finding it again.

Saturday evening before the vigil Mass (I know: not my holiest moment, mea-culpa), I went with the medium difficulty (why three levels?). 24 hours later I got one of the happier endings. Probably the best ending. The only ending I'll bother with. So: other observations? Um.

MicroProse, in horning in on Sierra turf with a touch of Kyrandia, seem not to have succeeded. Nobody over there (or anywhere else) mooted a sequel. Later will come a couple more games, fantasy Dragonsphere being perhaps the best-received (GOG were giving this away in the early 2010s). Very little else emitted from that side of MicroProse. The ScummVM team do allow Rex - but not Dragonsphere; it's a tossup if they will ever bother.

As to the universe-building: this is a human universe, perhaps on the H Beam Piper model of survivors from a commonwealth-collapse, if so certainly filtered through Infocom's Planetfall. The planet is not quarantined; it has quarantined itself. Everyone else has... let this happen. Maybe because future-we are to fear cooties.

The game holds that men and women are different yet not inferior/superior; the societies each side cooked up for themselves, absent each other, became dystopic. The women own tech to change sex at the genetic level; the women, here, are expert biologists, clearly too expert for their erstwhile men. The way the game handles this process is fantasy but hey, lightspeed, amirite. As Current Year goes, the game offends chiefly by asserting that even if someone could bend the genders, the transmogrified person remains that which s/he was Assigned At Birth. (Oh and there's a drag queen. He's Bruce. He doesn't pretend to be anything else. He doesn't count.)

Proofreading is poor. Graphics are... 1992; games of this time, of which we must call out SQ4 and SQ5, hit the unhappiest valley between pixelly early-Space-Quest and the cartooning of that last SQ game (yaaayyy pixelhunting). Code quality is decent, not notably buggier than a Sierra. The most player-disastrous bug is when saving the game on meeting the sea monster; so, ensure a save slightly before.

MicroProse claimed/boasted they designed away from needing to RESTORE except toward the end when multiple endings open up. To quote Dragonsphere, 'tis the thought that counts. You'll find yourself needing to remember/write numerics and if you don't, you'll be using RESTORE.

Honestly I wondered if the "good" ending was all that good. To progress, I had to allow a massacre of women, if not exactly innocent women. And then I had to destroy the mens' city. The game made me hit each where, I venture, it hurts the most. A darker slate of authors might have gone Spec Ops on me.

We'll likely not see much more in this genre which is played out. We'll likely not see much more in this universe or with this character, either. Even if someone wanted it (noone wants it) there's that horrible 2018 "Blurred Lines" decision to get through.