Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2: Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X! - IBM PC (1992)
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Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2
Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2
The year is 1958, and scientists have discovered a new planet on the edge of our solar system - the mysterious Planet X. Unfortunately, it's also been subject to invasion by the ravenous Leather Goddesses, having suffered a bit of humiliation after their defeat in the last game. One of its inhabitants, a little green monstrosity with eyestalks and tentacles named Barth flees into space, but crash lands on Earth in the sleepy town of Atom City, Nevada. Earth is next on the Leather Goddesses' subjection list, so two earthlings must team up with the ugly little creature and save the planet once again.
The game offers the choice of three characters: Zeke and Lydia, the two earthlings, and Barth, the alien. Zeke and Lydia function as the male/female roles like the first game - their quests are more or less identical, with some minor differences in dialogue. Their main goal is to sneak into the local military base and find some way to steal a radioactive isotope. Then, you team up with Barth for some brief jaunts to Planet X and Phobos, whose segments are so short and easy that they feel like cutscenes. Then the game's over. As Barth, you need to explore the town to eight different objects - weird stuff like billiard balls and such - to fix your ship, then the later portion plays out the same way as the humans.
The whole experience gleefully rolls around in references to cheesy 50s sci-fi, far more so than its predecessor - you can visibly see the strings on the planetary models - and the characters run the gamut of stock tropes and homages. Lydia's little brother is an excitable nerd with freckles, taped glasses, and copious amounts of conveniently useful scientific knowledge. Her father is a renowned wheelchair-bound scientist with a number of bizarre gadgets in his basement. The town sheriff is basically Barney Fife. There are tons of more explicit references too, many involving Dr. Strangelove - the sign outside of the General's house says "No Preverts" and one of the computer terminals speaks of "purity of essence". But while there's a lot of genuine enthusiasm from the subject material, it's no replacement for quality writing, which is in curiously short supply. Simply put, the game just isn't very funny. Sure, the name of the movie in the theater is "It Came on the Desert", and road through the town is the not-so-hilarious Route 69 - and that's about as witty as the game gets.
Of course, it doesn't help that the quest is bafflingly short. The town of Atom City is fairly expansive, with a number of locations - a bar, a diner, a whorehouse, a movie theater, and so forth - but there's nothing to do in most of them except maybe grab an essential item and trade some inconsequential dialogue with its inhabitants. Most of them barely have half a dozen lines, leaving them largely as caricatures rather than characters. It's oddly disappointing that the eponymous Gas Pump Girls have no actual bearing on the plot and only stand around to look pretty. The multiple player characters were supposed to improve replayability, but it's still not enough, as you can play through all three paths in maybe two or three hours, tops.
And like the first game, one of the big draws is the purported "naughtiness". As Zeke or Lydia, you can hook up with certain members of the opposite gender by talking to them once, which will then reveal a "Screw" icon. This will play a brief video of suggestive black and white stock footage - trains going into tunnels, missiles being launched etc. - and then things continue as normal. You can do it as many times as you want, but it has no real effect in the relationship between Zeke and Lydia, who, strangely enough, cannot hook up with each other at any point in the game. Other than some scant clothing, ample cleavages and noticeably perky nipples, there's no real nudity either, leaving the whole feature as little more than near meaningless sight gags that make Leisure Suit Larry seem intelligent by comparison. There are no differing maturity levels here either, although purportedly what was released was toned down a bit from its original drafts.
Beyond this silliness, LGOP2 is notable for being one of the first adventure games to feature fully voiced dialogue. This was before the proliferation of CD-ROM, so instead comes on seventeen disks and takes up 14 MB of hard disk space, roughly twice the amount of similar games of the time. It's painful to listen to, given that it's incredibly compressed, and the acting is predictably amateur. And most of the exposition is revealed through Barth, who has one of the most aggravating speech of them all. It seems like a waste that all of these resources went into the voice acting, seemingly at the expense of the rest of the game.
The manual makes note of evil agents that steal games and release them before they're finished, a self effacing admission that, yeah, clearly this game is incomplete. If the game was substantially longer, or the locations and characters were more fleshed out, perhaps on the scale of the original, this might've been a pretty good game, but instead it stands as evidence of a text adventure that couldn't properly make the transition to a new age.
Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2
Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2
Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2
Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2
Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2
Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2
Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2
Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2
Related Games
Lane Mastodon vs. The Blubbermen - IBM PC / Commodore 64 (1988)
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Lane Mastodon vs. The Blubbermen
Lane Mastodon vs. The Blubbermen
As the story begins, random animals are being enlarged to gigantic proportions by a mysterious ray from space, causing mayhem around all of the planet's landmarks. The perpetrators are the nefarious Blubbermen -- fat, shape shifting monstrosities with a taste for world domination. The only one who can stop him is Lane Mastodon, who's out on a vacation and is stranded out in the middle of nowhere. After running into two kids on a seemingly derelict vessel - the genius 13-year old boy Lambert Edison and his attractive older sister Ivory - the trio returns to Earth to face off in a climactic duel against the treachery of the Blubbermen.
So, for the most part, all you do is sit back and watch the story unfold. The only interaction comes when you can choose to follow the plot threads of different characters. Watching all of these divergences is necessary to fully understand the story, so at any time you can choose to fast forward or rewind through the story, skipping stuff you've already seen or backing up to choose a different branch.
It's an interesting idea, but for all of the grandstanding about creating a new form of media, it completely falters because it looks awful. Developed for the Commodore 64 and CGA-era IBM PC monitors, the artwork is abysmally simplistic, looking pathetic compared to Sierra's AGI games, which, by 1988, were pretty dated themselves. There's some cool scaling and panning trickery, and occasionally bits of animation, so you're not just watching static frames, but that doesn't excuse how incredibly sketchy it all looks. The IBM PC version has a higher resolution than the Commodore 64 version, but the latter has better coloring. To top it off, the writing is terrible. It's supposed to be a cheesy comic, but it comes more off more like a kindergartener's picture book. Meretkzy was apparently involved in the production, but the text shows none of his wit. Its humor is also pretty dull, other than a few amusing allusions - Lambert wields a sonic hammer, a take on Doctor Who's Sonic Screwdriver, and there are a few fourth wall breakages which show the story being viewed by a pair of Siskel & Ebert caricatures. But it's a far, far cry from real Infocom games, and its reputation as a disaster is completely justified.
Lane Mastodon vs. The Blubbermen
Lane Mastodon vs. The Blubbermen
Lane Mastodon vs. The Blubbermen
Lane Mastodon vs. The Blubbermen
Infocom Gallery Full of scans, including the Lane Mastodon comic.
Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2
After the purchase of Infocom by Activision, text adventure development slowed to a crawl before dying completely. Legend Entertainment picked up the slack for awhile, but a number of graphic adventures were still released by Activision, using the Infocom label. Most of these were Zork related, but they also managed to release a sequel to Leather Goddesses of Phobos. Relegated to obscurity, this second game, subtitled "Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X!" (complete with exclamation point) is a first person icon-based game with scanned, hand-drawn graphics, similar to Dynamix's Rise of the Dragon. Like its text-based predecessor, it relies heavily on homages to 50s movies, which are more fully realized here due to the sound and visuals, but it ends up faltering in a number of other unfortunate ways.
By 1988, text adventures were on their way out. Infocom kept hacking it at, with slightly more advanced titles like Zork Zero, but their overlords at Activision realized they needed to try a different route. Instead of developing graphic adventures, though, their first idea was to create a new type of product they called "Infocomics". They were not actually games, but rather animated stories that played out with minimal player interaction. They were obviously cheap to make and were released at budget prices. The releases were met with equal amounts of apathy from consumers and derision from critics, and as such, there were only four released. Two of them were based off Zork, one (Gamma Force) was based on an original property, and one was based on Lane Mastodon, the 50s sci-fi TV serial homage featured in the comic book included with LGOP. They were not actually developed by Infocom, but instead outsourced to a group called Tom Snyder Productions, which may explain their terrible quality. Beyond sharing the Lane Mastodon character, there is nothing else to connect to the Leather Goddesses of Phobos series.
Links
Mr. Bill's Adventureland - LGOP Review of the first game.
Mr. Bill's Adventureland - LGOP Review of the second game.
Everything2.com A quick write-up, including a story behind the title's origin.
