~6 minute readREVIEWS
Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2
All right, I'll admit it up front: I wasn't playing PC games back when Infocom's classic text adventures were first released. (In fact, I had yet to learn how to boot a computer.)
When I finally did try my hand at adventure gaming a few years back, I asked one of our editors what games he recommended. He asked if I'd ever played any Infocom games, and when I said no, he immediately began to rave about games like Zork, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Leather Goddesses of Phobos with a zeal that had me convinced before he'd even finished speaking.
It turned out that those Infocom games were so popular around the office that there were none left for me to try out. So you can imagine how excited I was to learn that the newly revamped Activision was releasing *Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2* (subtitled Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X*). Finally, here was my chance to experience an Infocom game, a sequel to a classic, in a format right in step with the current trends in graphics, interface, and sound. I figured if it turned out to be half as good as the descriptions I'd heard of the old Infocom games, I had a real winner on my hands. It seemed to good to be true....
And as the saying goes, if it seems to good to be true, it probably is. That's not to say LGOP2 is a bad game; in all fairness, it does many things better than a lot of other graphic adventures you could buy. But it has one major problem that can't be overcome by even the best graphics or sound effects: it's just too short and too easy.
You won't be tipped off to the game's brevity during the installation process. LGOP2 comes on ten 1.2 MB diskettes, and takes up around 15 megs on your hard disk once all the files are unpacked. With that much disk space, you'd expect a huge world to explore and tons of problems and puzzles to solve. But once you've thoroughly cruised all four streets in tiny Atom City, Nevada, of 1956, you've seen about 90 percent of the game.
The plot of LGOP2 has potential, especially for folks who appreciate cheap sci-fi movies from the fifties. A spaceship from "Planet X" has crashed on the outskirts of Atom City, and its occupant â Barthgub el Nikki-Nikki, son of Jelgobar el Zayda-Zayda, or Barth for short â has struck out in search of equipment to repair his damaged ship. You can play as one of three characters: Zeke Zarden, the ruggedly handsome gas-station owner; Lydia Sandler, the beautiful daughter of the local scientist and alien sympathizer Dr. Sandler; or Barth.
It's not Barth the earth has to worry about, though. It's the Leather Goddesses of Phobos, who plan on tricking us into thinking that Planet X is going to invade, then launching their own attack as we thank them for their help. To win the game as Zeke or Lydia, you travel to Planet X and Phobos in search of evidence that will convince the thickheaded officials on Earth that Phobos is the real threat. As Barth, you've got to find the parts to repair your ship in order to make the journey.
Most of Atom City's residents have gotten their notions of extraterrestrials from science-fiction flicks, and it's fun spotting references to classics like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Invaders from Mars, The Thing, War of the Worlds, and The Incredible Shrinking Man. There's even a 3-D sci-fi movie playing at the local theater (yes, it's really 3-D â go ahead and dig out those red-and-blue glasses, because there's another 3-D sequence further along in the game).
For the most part, the fifties motif is sustained very well. The screen for saving/loading games and making adjustments in sound and graphics display is called the "Play-O-Matic," represented by a colorful jukebox. (Nearly every item in Professor Sandler's house has "O-Matic" appended to it â Cupboard-O-Matic, Toast-O-Matic, and so on.) The Nixon-Eisenhower bulletin board and the town's gratitude for the "blessing" of atomic power are fitting, and the general who commands the nearby Army base is naturally anti-communist and, by logical extension, anti-alien.
But there's one aspect of LGOP2 that's definitely not lifted from that innocent era: sex. and plenty of it. It's not that the sex scenes are sprung on you without warning: one look at the title and the box art should let you know that there's going to some naughtiness here. And most players won't consider this stuff to be remotely pornographic. Though you're fully aware that the "act" is taking place, we've all seen a lot more graphic stuff on soap operas and prime time TV.
The problem is that the sex doesn't really fit the setting of the game â it's been ladled on top of the plot like so much gravy, obscuring the game's stronger elements. As Zeke, you'll have "trysts" with several women, but your romancing doesn't advance the plot or gain you any valuable items.
And your sexual "adventures" as Lydia are even more absurd because they're completely out of character. She won't kiss her true love Zeke, but with a slew of other fellows she's like a rabbit in heat, giving herself up at the drop of a hat (or feather, in the case of the stereotyped Indian who stands guard outside the reservation on the edge of town). It could be argued that limiting the ribald escapades to Zeke would have been somewhat sexist, but it's best to keep a straight face when you're spoofing the fab fifties, even if it means you're not politically correct for the nineties.
As noted, LGOP2 has several features that are clever and appreciated. The game is structured so you can't die or box yourself into a corner, so you won't find yourself replaying a large chunk of the game to retrieve an object or perform an action you overlooked. (This feature, however, makes the 20 save-game slots unnecessary; three slots â one for each character â would have been sufficient).
For players without sound cards, Infocom has included the "LifeSize Sound Enhancer," which lets you hear the digitized speech accompanying all written dialogue through a printer port (the game supports similar devices such as the Covox Speech Thing and the Disney Sound Source). The cartoonlike VGA graphics are more than adequate for the lighthearted nature of the game, and unlike some graphic adventures the screen redraws are surprisingly fast. Anyone who has played a recent graphic adventure will have the point-and-click interface down pat in a matter of seconds.
But unless you're a total greenhorn, you won't get a chance to really relish these features: LGOP2 is a very short game. It might seem as though there's a lot to explore in town, but you'll probably find everything you need on your second pass. After solving only a couple of moderately challenging puzzles on Earth, you head for Planet X (three or four screens), then Phobos (another four or five screens). There's a map you can grab to help guide you, but Atom City is so small that you can easily get by without it.
Why is a 15-meg game so lacking in scenery and difficulty? Much of that disk space is undoubtedly taken up by the digitized speech, but sadly the spoken dialogue which accompanies the static closeups of each character adds little or no excitement to the game. I would gladly trade all that speech for more problems to solve and locales to visit, and I suspect that most players will feel the same way.
If Activision can incorporate the challenge of the old Infocom games into the Leather Goddesses 2 engine, the result could be a game that novices and veterans alike can fully enjoy. We'll just have to wait and see.
This article appeared in
Game Players PC Entertainment
Sep-Oct 1992
These historical, out-of-print articles and literary works have been GNUSTOed onto InvisiClues.org for academic and research purposes.
