Infocom’s Leather Goddesses of Phobos is part satire of 30’s comic books and part juvenile titillation. In your brass bikini, or loincloth, depending on your gender, you must foil the Goddesses’ nefarious plan to make all of earth their pleasure palace and all earthlings their slaves. This might not sound like such a bad thing, but as your prisoner rule book tells you, it is “your unspeakably painful death” that will help bring it about. So there’s your incentive. Your epic struggle takes you from Upper Sandunsky, Ohio to Phobos, Venus, Mars, a battleship over Saturn and even.
.. Cleveland.
While not reaching the heights of Infocom’s brilliant and much-loved Zork series, Leather Goddesses is a reasonably entertaining game offering the sort of brain-straining puzzles and logic-defying wackiness that text-adventure aficionados have come to expect. My biggest problem with it is the sloppy programming. In a couple of places, a distinction is made between plurals and singulars, when it should not be. At the south pole of Mars, for example, you run into a group of penguins that won’t let you pass. If you type “look at penguins,” the parser will tell you, “I don’t know the word ‘penguins’.” But if you type “look at penguin” (singular), the response is “Totally ordinary looking mass of penguins” (plural). Such boners spoil the gameplay in places
and give the impression that Infocom rushed this game into production.
As for the sex (I’m sure you want to hear about the sex), don’t expect Penthouse-style explicitness. The game has three levels of “naughtiness”: Tame, Suggestive and Lewd. But even Lewd is, in my opinion, quite mild. I would feel completely comfortable letting a twelve-year-old play the game. There are five opportunities to get some action, so you will spend the bulk of your time wandering around and solving puzzles rather than getting down and dirty.
Do note that if you want to finish the game, you will need to read the comic book that came in the original packaging. Infocom equipped this game with creative copy-right control: a map, and vital hints that are incorporated into the comic storyline. A reproduction of this comic book can be found in the PDF file that came with Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces.
It is interesting to note, and it also fills me with nostalgia, that the original game also came with 3D glasses--to read the 3D comic book--and a scratch-and-sniff card, so that various odors (seven in all) that occur in the game can be experienced in real life. How nice it would be to get one’s hands on the original, full game complete with all its “feelies,” as they were called. Downloading off an abandonware site cannot provide the full experience. Ah, those were the good old days.
