~10 minute readSon of "Flesh Gordon?"
Infocom's Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2
| TITLE: | Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2: Gas Pump Girls Meet The Pulsating Inconvenience From Planet X |
| SYSTEM: | IBM |
| PRICE: | $69.95 |
| PROTECTION: | Document Look-Up |
| DESIGNER: | Steve Meretzky |
| PUBLISHER: | Infocom (label of Activision) |
1930. Upper Sandusky, Ohio. A lone, despondent soul sits slouched upon a bar stool, sipping away the worries of a world sunk deep in economic depression and tense with precarious political balances. Stepping into the bathroom to answer a call from the body's nether-regions, this lone soul assumes a gender and is whisked into a racy lampoon of the Flash Gordon era sci-fi.
1950. Atom City, Nevada. Twenty years, a world war and the nefarious acquisition and dismantling of a Massachusetts based computer game company have passed since the evil plans for world domination by the Leather Goddesses of Phobos were thwarted through the invisible efforts of a now dead Ohian. Now, in a bizarre twist of fate that could only be the set up to a sequel, the son of that unsung Earthling must now finish the job that his parent somehow left unfinished. Yes. Miraculously resurrected from their Ultimate Defeat, those leather girded dominatrixes are once again out to capture the hard disk space of adventure gamers in, Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2.
Steve Meretzky's Leather Goddesses of Phobos (LGOP) was a classic among the many text-adventure titles produced by Infocom during its glory days in the mid 1980's. LGOP was unique in that it was one of the first 'adult' computer games widely distributed and was the first to give the option of choosing between a male and a female protagonist in a genre that had, until then, completely ignored the female gamer. In addition, LGOP was composed of some of Meretzky's best humor, a challenging set of puzzles, and a funny, bawdy, though "mature" treatment of sex.
Since then, the original owners and designers of Infocom, as well as the days of text adventures, have been cast to winds. Meanwhile, Steve Meretzky has been keeping himself busy authoring Legend Entertainment's{Spellcasting 101 & 201} series of graphic adventures. LGOP2 finds Meretzky rejoining the Infocom label to revive his old title with a new era to parody and a new era of adventure game technology to exploit. Unfortunately, to the disappointment of this Infocom and Meretzky fan, the combination of author, production group, and new technology seems to lose the entire spirit of the original text game in the 'translation' to graphic adventure.
Similar to the original LGOP, LGOP2 can be played from different character perspectives. In LGOP2 these include: Brad, the son of the hero of the original game, Lydia, the daughter of the town astronomer, or Barthgub, a pulsating inconvenience from Planet X. With each character under their command, players see a somewhat different side of the story in pursuing different tasks and overcoming different obstacles. All are out to stop the evil devices of the Leather Goddesses, and all must romp through a rather good parody of 50's era sci-fi, which takes its shots at The Blob and War of the Worlds, among other xenophobic creations born on the eve of the "Space Age".
After the title, the author and the plot, all parallels between LGOP2 and its predecessor come to an abrupt halt. Any resemblance between the game interface for this game and the interface of the original, living or dead (and which can be succinctly described in one character, ""), is purely coincidental. Instead, the interface has been replaced by that of a typical graphic adventure. In the original, all the aural stimulation one could expect was the rapping of keys set to the beat of a computer fan, whereas LGOP2 boasts a complete soundtrack and digitized speech â lots of digitized speech. In fact, of the ten 5.25 inch disks the game came on, I would venture at least three-quarters are filled with speech. All of this is not necessarily an improvement.
The LGOP2 game environment is, like all graphic adventures, divided into discreet locations given full graphic descriptions. The graphics themselves are spotty -- with the occasional well done piece (some very nice stuff in the introduction), but for the most part quite mediocre. They generally lack cohesiveness -- a quality indicative of a group effort without an overall artistic vision. Still, as the original LGOP proved, a game is not necessarily a beauty contest and, even if it were, there is always the talent show. We move to the interface...
Following the trend in the genre, LGOP2 has honed down its interface to the bare essentials. All possible interactions with the game are mediated by a happy little cursor that provides players with all the information they need. As the player moves the cursor about the screen, the cursor icon changes to reflect the 'interactive potential' of that object. If the icon is a hand or tentacle, depending on the character one is currently playing, then that item can be looked at or taken. If an arrow, one can go "thataway." If a mouth, dialogue is possible. Simply put, we have 'go', 'take', 'look', 'talk' and a combination of clicks that amount to 'use.' An interface can't get much tighter than that.
Now, many people like the direction adventure game interfaces are taking. The simpler they are, the more friendly and accessible the game becomes and the easier the game is to design and program. While an interface like LGOP2's is intuitive and unambiguous, it can often seem to err a bit on the side of simplicity. With the decrease in the range of player interactions (reduced, basically, to 'take' and 'use' in this case), it seems the range of possibilities for interesting puzzles decreases as well. More and more, graphic adventures are becoming Easter egg hunts where the player's job is to run around gathering goodies and putting them in their proper baskets. Admittedly, the balance between clarity and the expressiveness of player interaction has always been a difficult design decision, but it seems we may be taking the simplicity thing a bit to far. Then again, this is the opinion of an atavist who still thinks text parsers are a good idea.
If the heart of an adventure game is its story and puzzles then, frankly, LGOP2 could use a defibrilator -- stat. The storyline is rather cliche, though I suppose it would have to be as a spoof of the 50's era 'B' sci-fi movies. Certainly, the plot elements and the characterizations are all drawn from those 'classic' films. It certainly does a better job with the spoof than Cinemaware did with It Came From The Desert, though it seems to run dry in spots and it certainly runs short. The Leather Goddesses, for whom the game is named, have an all-too-brief role in the game, and the Gas Pump Girls, who were given second billing, have little to do with the plot. I was hoping they might have been possessed pawns of an alien mind or secret conspirators with the CIA or, at least, the Leather Goddesses incognito, but alas, all they turn out to be is an excuse for more bit-mapped bimbos and a catchy subtitle.
As for puzzles, they are pretty rare creatures in LGOP2. Playing the game as one of the humans involves a small handful of them, most of them of the "use-the-right-thing-on-the-right-thing variety," while the number of puzzles in the Barthgub (the alien) game can be counted on one tentacle. Playing as Lydia the first time through, with the digitized speech turned on and playing at a leisurely pace, I finished that game in about 6-7 hours and thereby, challenged the records established by Loom and Space Quest IV. As the alien, it was more like one hour. A member of the LGOP2 design team addressed this issue by stating that the game was targeted toward a beginner level gamer. I thought this odd considering that, one, this is a Meretzky game (who is described in the documentation, in reference to the puzzles, as having a "truly devious mind"); two, is a sequel to a game with interesting and challenging puzzles; and three, that nowhere on the game packaging is this fact pointed out.
Sp..p..peach Immmmm...pediments
As mentioned earlier, LGOP2 supports a huge amount of digitized speech in its character interactions. In fact, I would say that LGOP2 includes the most ambitious speech support effort ever packed into an entertainment product. The pleasantly surprising part of it is that one need not even own a sound board to hear this dialogue, for the game package includes an adapter, called the LifeSize Sound Enhancer, that will pipe quality speech through a printer port and out to amplified speakers. The sound quality from this adapter is very nice; it's loud and clear. Unfortunately, the actual readings of the dialogue shoot well below par.
One would think that if a design group were going to invest so much time and disk space (both = money) to speech, they would invest a little more to get decent speech talent to do the readings. In a penny-wise pound-foolish production decision, it appears as if the 'front-office' people at Activision were rounded up and given a shot at their 15-minutes of stardom. Unnatural pacing, wooden emotion and unconvincing caricature take part in a production strongly suggestive of mediocre amateur theatre. At its best, the speech does not add a thing and, if I hadn't been playing for the purpose of a review, I would have opted to play without it after the first few wincing minutes. I sure wish they would have traded a couple megabytes of this stuff for a few more hours of game play.
Es Ee Eks
I approach the issue of sex with fear and trepidation. It's a can of worms, and no matter how I handle it, there will, without fail, be ordnance heading my way from all camps. Nonetheless, I think a few words here are appropriate, so I'll hunker down in my bunker and listen for incoming.
First off, anyone who could get much titillation from a cartoonish computer game like LGOP2 is pretty hard pressed or a very frustrated young teen (usually it's both). If one were seeking pornography one would be well advised to seek out another medium. Sex (as well as vulgar language and 'adult themes') in computer games, then, should be used to achieve other aims. For example, one might use these "tools" to add realism to a dramatic storyline or as a comedic tool in a humorous game like LGOP or Sierra's Leisure Suit Larry. Indeed, it seems the cartoonishness of the graphics and the silliness of character caricatures in games like these create a fertile playground upon which to dance upon taboos and lampoon the sillier aspects of human behavior. As Steve Meretzky says in his disclaimers on his adult games, "Sex is fun" and, I might add, is funny as well, in appropriate contexts. I believe it was precisely this adult, 'sex is fun' treatment of the 'nasty' content in Meretzky's earlier racy works (and in Sierra's Larry series) that protects these game's from most accusations of being pornographic.
The approach to sex in the original LGOP was silly and irreverent, and yet at the same time, through Meretzky's particular humorous slant, lent a 'mature attitude' to the treatment. However, the sex in LGOP2 seems to take on a much different color. One probable cause is the fact that Meretzky's humor does not shine as brightly as in his others games. In previous games, his humor is at its best in descriptions and in witty come-backs to player actions, whereas in LGOP2, the game's structure eliminates much of the need for description and, for obvious reasons, places emphasis on character dialogue. Whether for lack of inspiration or lack of opportunity, good chuckles are sparse in LGOP2.
Perhaps this is one reason why the treatment of sex in LGOP2 seems so gratuitous, and adolescent, and (to use a friend's favorite adjective for pop music) insipid. The game's 'explicit' visual content is all very tame (no more explicit than a beer commercial, really) and, for the most part, involves rather mediocre images of women in tight shirts, garters, or leather, most with impossibly protruding nipples. It's the stuff of a Wally Cleaver daydream, which is appropriate to the game context, I suppose. It appears quite innocuous at first, yet as I played along I began to sense an underlying attitude running though it all that can best be seen in the use of a whorehouse in the game. When one approaches this whorehouse, one is served a menu of a dozen or so names to choose from. Choosing a name takes players to a harlot's room and affords them a "look at the goods". Though loosely integrated into the storyline, it is all too apparent that it is merely an excuse for a slide show of more rather average drawings of women. You have to wonder what Activision was thinking. Do they imagine adults are turned on or, at minimum, entertained by this stuff? If they do, then I think they've misunderstood their market. And that must be the case, for the only other possibility is to suggest that their real target market is actually, and more insidiously, a younger, larger slice of the computer game demographics pie.
If there is anything that can save LGOP2 it's Meretzky's occasional gem of a barb or wise crack, and his goofy spoof of old sci-fi movies. The yucks, however, are few and far between; the story is too short and the puzzles are too weak for most gamer's blood. If you want Meretzkian prose, take Activision up on its $9.95 offer for the original LGOP and bide your time with that classic, while waiting for someone to produce an interesting 'adult' adventure.
This article appeared in
Computer Gaming World
Jul 1992
These historical, out-of-print articles and literary works have been GNUSTOed onto InvisiClues.org for academic and research purposes.
