Leather Goddesses of Phobos - Infocom RRP œ24.99

It was an ordinary evening in Upper Sandusky,  Ohio, back in 1936. 
I had been  drinking a few beers in Joe's Bar and reading a  comic 
book  about  the Leather Goddesses of Phobos.  It was set  in  the 
future,  1986,  and  told  how,  every fifty  years,  the  Leather 
Goddesses  leave Phobos to attempt to enslave the Earth and  turn 
it into their private pleasure world.

Heading back to the bar after a visit to the Ladies' room,  I  was 
suddenly captured by some tentacled aliens,  and when I came round 
several  hours  later,  I found myself in a  cell  on  Phobos.  My 
overalls had gone and been replaced by a brass bikini.

In a nearby cell,  I met Tiffany,  another captive.  She suggested 
that  we  team up to beat the Leather Goddesses,  and  though  she 
admitted that she wasn't very bright,  she came up with the design 
for a machine that we could use against them, if we could find the 
materials. 

It was a very strange list,  including a six foot length of rubber 
hose, some cotton balls and a household blender, but we set off to 
explore and try to find them.............

This  is  the  start of Leather  Goddesses  of  Phobos,  a  comedy 
adventure by Steve Meretzky, who has written four other adventures 
for Infocom, including The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It is 
standard level but not easy by any means.

You can play the adventure as either sex, according to whether you 
visit the Ladies' or Gents' at the beginning of the game.  If  you 
play  as a man,  your companion will be another man called  Trent, 
and, naturally, you won't be wearing the brass bikini! You'll have 
a loin cloth instead.  

Not  only  can you pick which sex you want to  be,  you  can  also 
choose from three playing modes,  tame,  suggestive, and lewd. The 
default  mode is suggestive.  If you pick tame  descriptions,  I'm 
afraid  the computer will yawn at you.  As for lewd....I'll  leave 
that to you to find out!

There's  a  novel way to travel in this adventure as  you  can  be 
transported  to various locations using black circles.  Step  onto 
one and you're sucked through into another place. In this way, you 
can visit Mars,  Venus,  a spaceship orbiting Saturn and,  of  all 
places,  Cleveland,  back on Earth. You'll find one circle on Mars 
which  annoyingly  turns  from black to white  as  you  enter  the 
location  so  you'll  have to  find some means  of  restoring  its 
colour before you can use it.

When  on Mars,  the largest area,  you can also travel  along  the 
canals  in a Royal Barge and,  by careful use of the  two  buttons 
which make up the simple controls, stop at several docks along the 
way.   The  names  given  to  these  docks  are  typical  of   the 
adventure...there's Hickory & Dickory Dock, Baby Dock and Wattz Up 
Dock, to name a few.  

As you start collecting the items for the machine, you'll discover 
another fact about Tiffany...she's very accident-prone. If there's 
any  possible  way  to  die in  the  adventure,  she'll  find  it. 
Fortunately,  she's  also extremely lucky in  that,  while  you're 
mourning  her  death,  she  has in fact been rescued   by  a  time 
traveller  with  a  matter  reconstituter,   or  dimension-hopping 
midgets  so,  sooner or later she'll reappear with some  fantastic 
explanation. 

You'll meet several characters on your travels. There's King Mitre 
who turns everything he touches into forty-five degree  angles.  A 
mad  scientist is experimenting on gorillas and Venus flytraps  on 
Venus,  trying  to  discover whether the sex drive  of  a  species 
resides  in its  brain or body.  A Sultaness,  who will set you  a 
fiendish  riddle to solve,  has her Palace on one of the banks  of 
the Martian canals.  I mustn't forget Thorbala, the chief assassin 
of the Leather Goddesses,  who is responsible for one of Tiffany's 
sudden "deaths".  

At various points in the adventure,  you'll be prompted to use the 
scratch'n'sniff card provided in the packaging. Some of the smells 
are pretty terrible,  so be warned! Also included in the packaging 

is a 3-D comic book which gives a few hints for the adventure, and 
a  map of the catacombs under the Sultaness' palace.

The parser will cope with most commands that you care to try,  and 
has the essential OOPS command. This is very useful if you've just
typed in a long sentence but  forgotten how to spell "Thorbala"! 

It's impossible to give more than a brief idea of how good Leather 
Goddesses of Phobos is.  It's very enjoyable,  funny and extremely 
addictive. What more can you want from an adventure? 

                                          Sue