~4 minute readPCG Reviews
Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2
Do I know you? A sequel typically has enough in common with its parent that the two wouldn't have to chat about the weather if they met on the street. But Infocom’s two Leather Goddesses of Phobos adventures are like distant, distant cousins. The names are the same, and there’s something vaguely similar about the sense of humor, but otherwise they’re strangers.
The original is a primal tale of lust, weakness, and bad "50s science fiction, all brought to the screen during a time when graphics were heresy, plain and simple, to hardcore adventurers. This newest version, from a recently revived Infocom, is a point-and-click graphics adventure with a solid hour of speech, music, VGA, and animation. It’s a very sporty, snug 1992 package, and exactly the sort of game that would have made a dedicated Infocom fan bristle — with some justification, as it turns out.
BEACH BALLS, BABES, AND BARNEY FIFE
Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2 is set in the rather austere confines of Atom City, Nevada, a no-traffic-light town bounded by the Mesquito Indian reservation, an army base, and...well, a rock slide. Ordinarily the rock slide would be a tunnel, but a spacecraft set off the slide when it crash-landed. Its occupant, an alien beachball with eyestalks, roams loose, frightening the bejesus out of everybody. The Goddesses, who turn up a bit later, are essentially leather-undied space Amazons who are making a second attempt to enlist Earth's population as love slaves. Not bad work if you can get it.
The town’s easy to find: It's halfway between Parody and Stereotype. The sheriff is a dead ringer for The Andy Griffith Show’s panicky Barney Fife. A good chunk of the female community is already doing Leather Goddess-style work in the local brothel. (Remember, this is Nevada.) People seem to have gotten their ideas about alien life from the movies: Explicit and oblique references to bad science-fiction pictures, and even to good science-fiction computer games, abound.
In purely aesthetic terms, the game is sweet. Everyone speaks in his or he own distinctive voice, provided your machine has the right audio hardware. If it doesn’t, you can use the included gizmo that plugs into your printer port, which helps pipe sound through your stereo. By contrast, the music’s only okay — a little too Leisure Suit Larry-ish and affectedly zany for my taste — and I wish they’d shut it down when someone's talking.
The lush full-screen VGA graphics could have come off the cover of some 1950s magazine. They’re typically static, but you can often view a given scene from more than one direction, a touch that only adds to the process of discovery. And the you-click-on-it-you-carry-it interface is butter slick: directional arrows for movement, a toolbox for retrieving the odd stuff you'll collect (a staple remover, a rubber hose, an army uniform, iodine), and a little mouth for chatting. That last one brings you in for a closeup encounter and a set of icons: portraits for questions on particular topics, lips for kissing, and occasionally a screw to...ah, y'know.
TRIPLE THREAT
One of the nicest things about Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2 is that you can play it from the perspective of any of three different principal characters: garage operator and man's man Zeke Zarmen; his sweetheart Lydia, daughter of the local scientist; or the Alien, whom we'll call Barth for short. "That's charming from the story's point of view alone.
Naturally, you can coax the game into a lot of nonessential contorting and babbling under your probing mouse pointer. The brothel is almost incidental to the game, but offers pinup poses of a dozen women. You can pop into the radio station and play the game's incidental music. You'll find a number of items with no obvious use in the solution, but bet there's some fun that lies deeper. (There's even a buried plug for the forthcoming graphics adventure Return to Zork.)
But for all these enjoyable little perks, the game itself is rather small for a 15-megabyte whopper. Like a number of recent, easygoing graphics adventures, this one’s little better than an afternoon’s entertainment, maybe two and a half afternoons if you play all three parts. (If you’ve played through with one character, the others become that much easier.)
Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2 seems to have been swallowed up by the amenities, rather than simply abetted by them. The puzzles of old are gone; this game clearly comes from the “find it here, use it there, then haul it around forever” school. Exploring the town and its environs is fun, but your progress is almost automatic once your little party leaves Earth. Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2 is far too easy for any but beginning gamers — who are probably too young to be looking at semi-naughty bits anyhow.
Like many sequels, this one lacks a clear reason for its existence, beyond the popularity of the original. It's as though the shiny new interface itself was justification for its publication. You'll giggle occasionally, but it's more cute than funny, especially compared with the Spellcasting series for Legend. It’s not even all that sexy. To top it off, my copy of LGOP 2 came on 17 (count ’em) 3.5-inch low-density disks. By the time Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2 was installed, I felt as though I were working in some dead-end disk-factory job and needed a coffee break. Bring on the CD-ROM.
Infocom, РО. Box 67001, Los Angeles, CA 90067, (310) 207-4500; IBM PC or compatible, 1OMHz 286 or faster; 640K RAM (560K free/VGA, 590K free/EGA), DOS 3.3 or later (DOS 5.0 recommended); EGA, VGA, MCGA, Tandy 16-color; supports AdLib, ProAudio Spectrum, PS-1, Roland MT-32/LAPC1, Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster Pro, Sound Master, Sound Source, Speech Thing, Thunderboard; requires hard-disk drive, 15МВ free; mouse recommended; $69.95
This article appeared in
PC Games
Dec 1992
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