Planet of Lust

From C.E. Forman's description of Free Spirit's horrendous adult adventure games:

"Free Spirit Software published a number of adult text adventure games for PC and possibly other platforms. All of their titles (with the exception of The Last Inca, which was G-rated) featured intergalactic hero "Brad Stallion" and his ship, the "Big Thruster". They're all pretty much rip-offs of Infocom's Leather Goddesses of Phobos, but distinctly aimed at male players (unlike LGoP, which allowed you to choose your gender) and minus Steve Meretzky's wit. These were not sold in family-oriented software stores and are quite difficult to come by."

The first game in the trilogy is Sex Vixens from Space, which comes in a bigger package than other Free Spirit games. The goal in this one is to explore a planet populated only by women . Sounds like Rex Nebular, right? Well, the game is much, much worse. There are so many things wrong with Sex Vixens from Space that I don't know where to begin. On the surface, it's your typical text adventure-- type VERB + NOUN commands to progress, and use inventory items to solve puzzles, etc. However, the parser in this game is so horrible that Infocom fans will probably cringe after the first few minutes. Aside from having a very limited vocabulary, the parser expects only the exact VERB + NOUN command that the designers have in mind.

The sequel, Planet of Lust, suffers from exact same problems, except the plot is even more ludicrous: your goal is to thwart "the evil Doctor Dildo" . You start off on the same ship (and guess what the ship's name is...), and run into the same stereotypical, sex-starved women as in the first game. Same parser problem, same result: a horrible excuse of a game. Fortunately, Free Spirit finally realized how stupid their parser is, and replaced it with icon-based interface for the third and final game, Sex Olympics, in which you participate in Sex Olympics tournament. The point-and-click interface makes the game a bit more tolerable (since you no longer need to guess the verb), thereby elevating it above the Real Dog status of the first two games, although it's still pretty bad.

Some of the command icons are "screw," "jerk off" (no, I'm not kidding-- it apparently is not needed to win the game either, just to show you more of the game's cheap writing), and "kiss." 'Nuff said. One good idea is that you can recruit women to follow you around, although they serve no real purpose other than being the object for "screw" command. To add insult to injury, the entire Brad Stallion trilogy has very atrocious writing (which urges you, Brad Stallion, to have sex with women whenever it possibly can), inane puzzles, and very "cheap" use of sex as an excuse for a game.

Overall, these are games that reaffirm my opinion that whoever plays games to see "adult situations" should visit porn sites instead of torturing themselves in front of the computer screen. Stay away from these games as far as you can-- or download them if you're a die-hard collector like me, and ignore them for the rest of your life.

Review By HOTUD