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The time: around 3 a.m.

The problem: I've just awakened, my nostrils flaring with the hideous scent of mothballs, subtly blended with the aroma of a pizza that has matured for months in a public lavatory.

The solution: crawl under the bed-clothes and - Yes! There's your Leather Goddesses Of Phobos scratch 'n' sniff card scrumpled up under the duvet.

Yes, this game actually has a real scratch 'n' sniff card for you to gag over. It also has just about everything else you'd look for in a brilliant adventure. Tricky puzzles, brilliant text, a whopping great price tag, disk-only specification, and best of all, three playing levels.

Playing levels? Yessir! Tame (yawn), Suggestive (hmmm...), and Lewd (ye gods!). And in a game where you must escape the clutches of the maniacal Leather Goddesses who are intent on using you as an unwilling experiment in their hideous investigations into 'How to take over Man (of Woman) Kind', you'll have plenty of opportunity for savouring all three.

The basic aim of the game is to collect a number of objects which range from a length of hose to a copy of the Cleveland phone book - and thereby construct a machine which will destroy the wicked LGs and save your bacon. 'Tis not an easy game, but 'tis beautifully logical in construction and like all Infocom titles worth every penny of the rather elevated price.

Really this game is so good that I don't know what to say next. Should I tell you about the time I got turned into a gorilla and locked into a cage with a female of that species? Should I tell you about what happened when I, being in the company of the aforesaid lady gorilla, selected the Lewd level of play? No, I should not.

Or should I tell you about the brilliant touches of programming - the selection of your sex, for example. If you enter, at the beginning of the game, the 'ladies' toilet, you are henceforth female. If you chose the 'gents', you are ... well, we assume you are.

Or should I tell you about the humour? As you struggle with the Mad Scientist who is about to strap you to the bed and carry out some Fiendish experiment, you type in desperation: 'Kill the Mad Scientist'. And what's the response? "Relax ..." Aaaaaghghghg!

Or should I inform you of the painstaking attention to detail in the (ordinarily) unimportant responses from the parser. For example, you try to 'Tie hose to switch'. Well, you can't - and in any ordinary adventure you might be told "You can't do that!". In Leather Goddesses you get:

'You've tied the rubber hose! In the third quarter, with forty seconds on the clock, the score is rubber hose 17, player 17!!! But seriously, folks, you can't tie the rubber hose.'

Well, seriously, folks, even if you can't tie the leather hose, you better go out and add this one to the collection. It's not only very amusing, written by Steve Meretsky of Hitchhikers and Sorcerer fame, packed with features, brilliantly designed, and complete with scratch 'n' sniff and 3D glasses - it's also quite disgusting, and all in the best possible taste.