<!--
	Title: Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2
	Author: Peter Olafson
	Source: PCGames, v5(6)
	Date: December 1992
	Transcription by Steve Derby
-->

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.

<figure class="float-right-half">
	<img src="/public/img/articles/pcgames-review-lgop2/lgop2-screen-shot.jpg" alt="Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2 screenshot">
	<figcaption class="bold center">Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2 is a point-and-click graphics adventure.</figcaption>
</figure>

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*
