Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2 - Activision RRP œ38.99
               (Graphic adventure for PC only)

                   Reviewed by The Grue!

The year is 1956. It's election year in the USA and the Leather
Goddesses of Phobos are, for the second time, planning to invade
the Earth and turn it into their private pleasure world. One of
Earth's most renowned scientists, Prof. Sandler, suspects
something is up and the Leather Goddesses are well aware of the
existence of a tenth planet in the solar system, called Planet X.
The beings of Planet X are peaceful and technologically advanced,
perfect pawns for the Leather Goddesses' gameplan.

In LGOP2 you can choose to be one of three main characters in the
story, Lydia, Zeke or Barth, the space alien, although the Zeke
and Lydia games are identical. If you choose to play Zeke or
Lydia, you find yourself on the way to check out the meteor that
crashed earlier that evening in the foothills. Upon locating the

crash site you discover a spacecraft of some description. Deciding
to find its owner you head off back into Atom City.

Once back in town, and with a bit of exploring, you find that the
alien has been almost everywhere. The local sheriff even had him
locked up in his cell but the slippery fugitive escaped. Only when
you visit Prof. Sandler's house and question Jimmy do you find out
that it was injured, hungry and for some odd reason wanted the
clothes iron. Jimmy also tells you what will heal and feed the
creature so off you go to collect the goodies. Along the way you
find that the research base is under threat of closure and that
General Wedgefellow has been duped by the Leather Goddesses,
thinking this will save his beloved base from closure.

Only by helping Barth return to Planet X will you be able to
travel on to Planet Phobos and thus thwart the evil (but sexy)
Leather Goddesses. After all, you couldn't let them invade the
Earth and take all the men to restock their private harems, could
you?

Playing the game as Barth is the easiest of the three characters
and you will have to find the eight objects that will enable you
to repair your craft. Once this has been done and you meet up with
Zeke and Lydia, then all three games are exactly the same, so
Infocom's claim of three games in one is not really true. In
reality one could say there are only one and a half games for you
to play.

Movement around the game is simple; by moving your cursor around
the screen it will change into an arrow illustrating the
directions you can travel in, then just click and you will be
moved in that particular direction. You can talk to other people
in LGOP2 by simply clicking on them. This will bring up a close-up
of the person and some text. Your cursor will then change into a
mouth, indicating the need to click again. After the text
disappears, some icon buttons usually appear on screen.

The uses of these icon buttons are quite obvious. One showing
clasping hands means to greet someone. If you see an icon with the
image of another person or an object on it, that means you can ask
the person you're engaged in conversation with to tell you about
the object or other person.  An icon with a pair of lips shouldn't
need explaining, especially in a game written by Steve Meretzky.
On occasions, other icons will appear. These are left for you to
figure out what they are for but, as I said before, the game is
written by Steve Meretzky and, if they are pressed, often bring up
one of a number of digitized animated screens. This leaves the
player in no doubt about the playing mode of the game!

Objects are picked up by clicking on them. Your mouse pointer will
then change into the object you have just picked up. You can then
either put it in your inventory or click it on another object to
use the two together - simple. Once an item has been picked up it
can't be dropped again unless you need to in order to solve a
puzzle and if you wish to wear or read an object it must be in
your inventory first.

LGOP2 is, according to the manual, a really, really large game.
Well, it might look that way once you've installed the 17 disks on
your hard drive and realised that it has used at least 15 meg of
it. I'm sorry to say that the game is mostly taken up with the
graphics/animation (some digitized) and the music and speech. All
of the interaction between the characters is shown on screen and I
found it enhanced the personality of each character nicely. The
music was nice but I found it obtrusive as it tended to drown out
the speech a little too much for my taste but you can turn it off,
as you can with the speech. The graphics were nicely drawn and
when in close-up the detail was excellent. With the game comes a
small interface for people who haven't got a sound card that
supports digitized speech. It plugs into the printer port,
enabling you to plug it into your stereo. This is a nice bonus for
people because this interface will work for most games that
support similar devices like the Corvox speech thing or Audiobyte.

The main problem with LGOP2 is that it is far too easy. There are
not many locations or objects or puzzles. What puzzles we do have
can be solved rapidly. For instance, I installed it, solved all
three characters, typed up the solution to each of them, wrote
this review and painted the kitchen in four evenings. Not much for
your money (about 40 quid).

Having said that, I did enjoy the game. It had humour, a
reasonable storyline, good graphics etc and, being the only
Infocom game I hadn't got, I would have bought it regardless but
others might want to be more cautious.

It's a pity Infocom are no longer with us as this, being written a
few years back, shows us that they had the basics of a nice system
that could have been developed. Even on this showing, they could
have taught Sierra a thing or two about how to write a graphic
adventure that runs so quickly you'd be hard pressed to play a
text game as fast. At the very end of the game we are told to look
out for the final thrilling chapter of the Leather Goddesses -
does this mean they planned to write a LGOP3?

Rating: Graphics 8, Sound 9, Value for money 4, Enjoyment 8,
        Smuttiness 10