Richard's Online Journal

[14/04/07] Retroplay: Leisure Suit Larry

Still swinging after all these years. And Larry's back too.

What's all this about? A shameless nostalgia trip, that's what. Vivendi's about to re-release a load of its classic adventures on DVD form, and while the handling of said re-release is pretty piss poor (an incomplete selection of games, a reliance on DOSBox, and so on), it's inspired me to go back and play through a few old franchises in their entirety.

I'm currently working my way through Space Quest III - it's amazing how the old memories flood back - but first up, I thought we'd take a look at one of the most unfairly maligned characters in gaming.

Larry Laffer. Leisure Suit Larry. The first game was based on an old IF game called Softporn Adventure, famous for a naked Roberta Williams on the box and not much else. Deservingly, to be honest - 'twas rubbish. Al Lowe's version, Larry 1, put graphics to it and added both character and jokes. The series quickly developed a reputation for being nothing but filthy, dirty smut about a pathetic loser trying to bed every woman in sight - a reasonable enough assumption if all you had to work with was a quick description. At times, it deserved that slam. The women in it tended to be gold-digger types, and there's no question that Larry's mission boiled down to getting lucky.

However, for the most part, it just wasn't true. The series was almost completely harmless, using Carry On style innuendo, rarely dropping a swearword, and bitterly disappointing any kid who got their hands on a copy with the near total lack of sex, nudity, or anything else they'd been told to expect. Rather than a comedy sex game, it was a comedy about sex - an important distinction - and one which offered a much more moral core than non-players expected. Most of the time, Larry's escapades end in nothing but comic humiliation; the odd time he does actually get lucky with a random conquest, it's almost always depicted as an empty, unfulfilling experience that drives him to keep seeking his One True Love.

Lucky in craps, lucky in life. Especially when you cheat at both.

That element faded out a bit as the technology was able to spend more time on the comedy, and the games get increasingly raunchy as time goes on - never pornographic (with the exception of the hidden ending to Larry 7), but increasingly graphic. Where Magna Cum Laude, the sequel that DIDN'T EXIST, first went wrong was in forgetting all of this; trying to repaint Larry as a cool swinger type in the Austin Powers mould. In the real games, that wasn't the case at all. He was simply the unluckiest guy in the world, desperate to be liked, and determined to bounce back from anything.

This, combined with a resolutely naughty rather than erotic outlook on his adventures, was what made him a much more sympathetic character than his obnoxious, sociopathic shit of a nephew - mixing the cruel desire to see what horrors fate had in store for him with wanting to see him snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and walk off a winner. Wow, that was a long sentence.

Suffice it to say, there's a reason the series lived on so long, and why it had a pretty strong female following throughout the years too. Oddly enough, it wasn't the occasional glimpse of boobies.

Let's dive in with his first adventure, shall we?

In The Land of The Lounge Lizards

The adventure begins. And ends in death five seconds later.

That's right, we're looking at the original version. The VGA remake is so ugly, people have died trying to look at it without protection. Police Quest 1 VGA? Looked great. Space Quest 1 VGA? Fantastic. Quest For Glory? Amazing. Larry? Look at those lovely EGA graphics. Larry 1 took place in scenic Lost Wages, aka Not Las Vegas, with Larry's main quest being to lose his virginity. That One True Love thing mentioned up above? Yep. He can hop into bed with a hooker barely ten minutes into the game, and it proves to mean nothing whatsoever.

Seeking something more spiritual than a quick shag, he accidentally gets himself married to a gold-digger, Fawn, who promptly ties him to his honeymoon bed, and runs off with all his money. It's only when he bumps into penthouse bunny Eve that things get better, with a more symbolic offering of an apple leading the two of them into a warm, united future. And instead of the long awaited sex scene, we cut away, just before they get into bed together.

The only sex scene in the entire game. Erotic, no?

The main reason this one's an adult game has nothing to do with the sexual content - it's the sleaziness of the world. There's puzzles involving drugs, alcohol, and gold-digging black widow types that... let's just say, aren't quite King's Quest territory. The main problem with it is a lack of direction. Several players I know never realised you could call a cab from the first location, and wound up stooging around Lefty's Bar for hours and hours, wondering what the heck they were meant to be doing. When it arrives, the ending is pretty abrupt, and the plot's not very strong.

However, what it does do well is create the seedy side of a Vegas style town - not big dazzling casinos, but crappy bars, drunks, bad comedians and beer soaked floors. Far from a hedonistic sleaze fest, it captures the depressing, crappy side of life - a Dodge to be gotten out of as quickly as possible, where the only pleasure to be had is in leaving. In a very real sense, you could argue that the apple Larry shares with his True Love Eve is what gives him the self-knowledge to escape his unsatisfying, manufactured Eden and into the far more enlightened real world.

But that would be insufferably pretentious, so don't.

Death Spotlight: Sierra games from this era had a love of death. Sierra Sudden Death Syndrome, I call it. Larry is no exception. For each game, let's pull one death, and celebrate it for the nigh-psychotic game design it most definitely is. But which one? The bit where he has unprotected sex with a hooker and his dick explodes? Tempting. The lethal roads? The toilet that flushes and floods the room, drowning you? The Sierra Factory, where new characters are made?

No. Let's go with something more interesting - the Hidden Death.

Don't ask where he got the gun from, but it would certainly have been useful against the alley mugger...

(Update: Commenter thefox informs me that this is actually in the game, not a lost scene. No matter. It's still cool) You're unlikely see this scene anywhere in the game. It's only (easily) accessible thanks to the fact that Larry 1 gave you access to the developers' debugger tool - hit Alt-X to skip the age-verification questions, hit Alt-D to fire it up. From there you can get any item, teleport anywhere, and do all sorts of other crazy stuff, like seeing this special ending. In this, Larry steps outside to reveal that his night is over, and he's still (technically) a virgin. And promptly shoots himself in the head. Never mind, Larry. Five more games to go...

Looking For Love (In Several Wrong Places)

Larry 2 was a strange, strange game. After shops refused to sell the first game, Sierra went with something more traditional, and much, much tamer. This Larry was a world-spanning adventure, with the KGB chasing him around the world trying to stick reeds up his fingernails, and a supervillain called Dr. Nonookee working out of a volcanic lair on a desert island paradise. After the first game, Larry's living with Eve, and happy - until she comes home, declares she has no idea who he is, and kicks him out on the street with just a bad leisure suit and a buck to call his own. Once again, it's back on the search for the his True Love, Only This Time, Actually True.

Larry 2 put the adventure back into its adventure game title.

The result is a brutally hard game, not because of the puzzles, but because of the endless opportunities to land yourself in a no-win situation due to not having picked up a particular item before leaving a location - a common fault with adventures in this era, but an exceptionally annoying one. The bigger scope did offer its benefits though. Larry got to do far more than most adventure characters ever manage, including going on TV, winning the lottery, going on a cruise, escaping international spy agencies, getting many haircuts, being eaten by wild animals, and earning the love of a beautiful topless native called Kalalau who brought the first bit of actual nudity into a Larry game, even if she was so pixellated that you'd have to squint to tell.

This one really ramped up the geek jokes, especially at the end - Larry's proof of devotion to Kalalau's people being to placate their god Peesee by coding an operating system in assembly language ("Eunuchs", unsurprisingly), with an odd explosive ending where he kicks ass with a molotov cocktail and the world's fiddliest text parser (the player having to type, for the first time in the game, "put THE bottle in THE bag" instead of "put bottle in bag"). Still, his quest over, he saves the day and gets the girl. Nothing can go wrong now, right? Right?

Death Spotlight: After winning the hand of the lovely Barbara Bimbo on a TV dating show, Larry is looking forward to a little shipboard action. Instead, he finds that his date has given the ticket to her mother - a sadistic, whip-wielding dominatrix with the self-control of a black widow. Almost makes the KGB seem gentle.

On the plus side, it's not dying of thirst on the open ocean because you forgot to buy a coke before leaving Los Angeles...

Passionate Patti In Pursuit Of The Pulsating Pectorals

Wait... who? Good question. Patti got introduced back in the last game as Polyester Patti, a lounge pianist in evil Dr. Nonookee's Secret Lair And Setup For The Sequel, but as the game ended, Larry was off to enjoy married bliss with his One True Love, Kalalau. As this new game begins, he's fat, comfortable, and happy. Sound familiar? Yep, once again, he gets dumped - this time in favour of a lesbian slot machine repairwoman - and it's back out into the world.

You don't even want to know what's going on here.

Larry 3 veers back after the second game's big world-spanning adventure, returning to a fixed location and lots of mini-puzzles. It ramps up the comedy element dramatically, with many more animated scenes, and a much bigger focus on physical humour. Larry's misfortunes in previous games tended to be the fatal kind - torture and death by the KGB, lethal STDs, being beaten to death in an alley... the gag coming from the narrator voice rather than the action. This is the point where Larry's life becomes a non-ending series of humiliations for your entertainment - ending up dancing in a feathery stripper style costume on stage, being attacked by crabs (the sand variety) on the beach, and of course, being used as a bowling ball by his boss/former father in law.

It's also the tightest game in the series so far. The goals are immediately obvious, and the puzzle chain intricate enough for exploration as well as solving. There's a lot of content here, much of it open to you at the start of the game. Lots of little touches show the increased attention to detail, such the new naming system - all the women's names (Patti, Tawni, Bobbi, Bambi etc) ending in an i - or the way that the secondary characters had far more defined personalities than last time. Albeit still mostly very grabby ones.

And this time, for once, they're both thinking it.

It's also proof that the people who think the series is a pathetic girl-get franchise are wrong. Despite kicking off the game with a Superman transition back into his (now poorly fitting) leisure suit, it's not long before Larry gets hooked on Patti, wins her affection, and the two end up in bed together. At which point, Patti accidentally moans another man's name, and a heartbroken Larry shuffles off into the island's lethal jungle to die.

What a pervert, huh?

Yeah, quite. Anyhow, the second half of the game doesn't work as well. It's one of the first examples of having a second character in one of these games, as the focus shifts to Patti. Her mix of arcade games and underwear related puzzles - coconuts in bra cups to make a bola, pantyhose to climb down a mountain and so on - don't really work. The ending offers some fun though, as the two reunited lovers fall out of the game and onto the Sierra studio lot - yep, like Blazing Saddles - and wind up wandering through the 'sets' for King's Quest, Police Quest and Space Quest, before meeting up with Roberta Williams and being hired to turn the story of their lives into an adventure game. "Give me a name of a bar," he says. "Lefty's," she replies. Fade out.

THE END. Totally. No more. It's done.

Death Spotlight: There weren't that many random SSDS deaths in this one, save falling off things. Instead, Larry 3 took the previous game's no-win situations and made them bureaucratic beyond belief - failing the many, many, many copy protection sequences (a pox on this, even in games like the excellent Conquests of the Longbow) or not dotting a particular 'i' means death!

Luckily, you were prompted to save all the time, but still - nngh. Perhaps the most gratuitious was here - the gym sequence, where all your items (including clothes) got stolen from your locker if you forgot to shut it. Hope you hadn't just been doing the 80 or so exercises you had to do to progress, because if so...

To continue, please fill out Tax Form 4B.

Passionate Patti Does A Little Undercover Work

This was Leisure Suit Larry 5, Larry 4 ("The Missing Floppies") having gone missing for one of three reasons - as a joke, because Al Lowe swore never to make a Larry 4 after finishing the series, or because the next game was meant to be an online thing for Sierra's burgeoning online network that never really took off.

Larry 5. Ugh. A whole game made of little but running gags that stumble, fall over, and hit their face against a urine soaked pavement slab.

Whichever it was, this game is horrible. Really bad. A total, floating in the toilet bowl for all time stinker. I'd forgotten how bad, until I played it for this write-up. Larry gets a job 'auditioning' the three sexiest women in America for a porn company's new show, while Patti is recruited by the FBI to investigate the mob. Neither matters. You can finish almost the whole game without solving a single puzzle, and the knock-on effects of your actions are precisely nil. What little plot there is is told entirely in cut-scenes of which you play no part, with all the conflict taking place off screen. It's slow, horrible, finnickly and poorly designed - a game with no death, but several no-win situations if you forgot to write down a key detail, and a story that barely pretends to have a plot. The innuendos come thick and fast, and far more graphically than before - and for the first time, the series is the childish girl-get crap that people said it was. Banana split jokes, bullet firing bras, dodgy gynecologists, Dan Quayle references...

Just say no to this game. Brr.

One interesting thing stands out though. Both Larry and Patti pass the time travelling with erotic day-dreams, and Larry's are all romantic ones towards her - picturing himself as Bogie, as a gondolier, as an adoring fan at one of her piano concerts. Even in this crap game, the One True Love thing holds true. As for Patti? She fantasises about boffing Donald Trump, Bill Gates and Scrooge McDuck.

Well, what else would you do with a Money Bin?

All things considered, it's probably best that this was her final appearance in the series, and that designers around the world went back to making games rather than cartoons. Although Torin's Passage did have its moments.

Death Spotlight: No deaths in this one at all, save dignity.

Shape Up Or Slip Out

Larry 6 suffers from losing the plot somewhat, fixing Larry 5's core mistakes. It's still a big step though, returning to the series' roots in much the same way as Larry 3 shuffled 2 back into its place. As the name suggests, it's set in a spa resort, and where Larry 3 pretended to be open ended, this one generally is - you can pursue each girl in more or less whatever order you like. Death isn't as common as the early games, and the adventure puzzles hang together much better. However, it's by far the tackiest game in the series, and the crudest until Magna Cum Laude showed up, with horribly uncomfortable graphics, gags about colonic irrigation, really bad gay stereotypes, and a deeply unconvincing One True Love all detracting from the fun.

Falling for a pretty girl, the Larry way.

All that said, it does have several really good scenes. The highlight is the country number, Cell Block Love, where singer Burgandy performs a ballade about Sweet Cheeks, Sonny Bond's long-suffering ex-prostitute girlfriend from Sierra's Police Quest series ("Is it so wrong, a workin' girl, who loves a man in blue? I hope I nevah make parole from Cell Block Love with yew..." - hear the whole thing at Al Lowe's homepage), but the orbital bungee platform, deadly liposuction machine, and wide range of characters mean that there's usually something weird enough to keep your attention round the next corner.

This is the first time the series focused on one small location, giving it much more scope for visual gags, interconnecting locations to get a proper sense of place, and seperating the locations to let you focus on whichever bits you want to do first. And Charlotte Donnay does look lovely straight out of a mud bath. Overall, it's okay, but hasn't aged very well. The areas that worked would be greatly improved for the next game, and much of the tat thrown out in favour of funnier tat and a more playful atmosphere.

Death Spotlight: We're firmly back in the grip of SSDS for this one. The winner? That would be the one where Larry goes into his glass-walled bathroom, starts 'playing' with some hand-lotion, draws a crowd of just about everyone in the entire game outside, and promptly dies of shame. Eeew.

Bleach will be provided to remove the memory of ever seeing this image.

Love For Sail

Stupidly not included in the forthcoming Sierra Collection, Love For Sail is easily Larry's finest hour. It's much the same concept as Larry 6, except swapping the health spa setting for a cruise liner, and really pushing the comedy element to the forefront. There's still some overly crude jokes in there that don't hit their mark, including one stunningly poorly judged one where Larry essentially buggers an old man to death, but for the most part things are kept light, fun, and always frothy. And that makes all the difference in the world.

The use of a text parser for conversations means that the women this time around have much more to say, and with it, much more personality, complete with excellent writing and voice-work all over. The humour is still full of innuendos and the odd fart joke, but with the focus back on being naughty rather than rude or sleazy. From start to finish, the game delights in setting up its many scenes for maximum embarassment, but always leaving Larry's hopeful grin in place when he gets back to his room wearing nothing but a dice cup or similar trophy of failure.

Never let an easily amused librarian offer you a jacket to cover yourself when sneaking back home out of uniform.

It's the atmosphere that wins out in Love For Sail. It's a relentlessly cheerful game, with almost every character kicking back for casual fun in the sun - unlike the often cynical earlier games. The plot is non-existent - it's just a competition for the guys on the ship to spend the week with its pin-up girl Captain - but it's playful enough to get past this. More than any of the earlier games, this is the one where the reward for getting one of the girls on the ship is seeing Larry suffer. Even with a nudist character (Drew Baringmore - the girls this time are all actress parodies) and a game of Strip Liar's Dice (Dewmi Moore), the only flesh on offer is via easter eggs. The encounters are fun, packed with jokes - some good, some bad, some intentionally absolutely terrible - and ultimately, it's just a really likeable adventure.

It's also a much better one than most of its predecessors. You have much more freedom to pick and choose the order of puzzles than even Larry 6, many more characters to interact with, and backgrounds literally stuffed with hotspots for Neil Ross' wonderfully sardonic narrator to comment on. The highlight of the game has to be Larry's horrible cabin - the engine room, of course - where every single pixel has been meticulously designed to make his shipboard life as miserable as possible.

That'll teach him to get dates from Craigslist

Love For Sail finally brought everything together properly, as well as producing a far more successful interactive cartoon than the horrible Larry 5 ever dreamed of being. A good send-off to a very up and down series, packed with enthusiasm and attention to detail. Also, I wrote one of its jokes. So nyah.

Death Spotlight: No deaths, save that of the series. A round of applause, if you will.

Magna Cum Laude

Is not a Leisure Suit Larry game. I don't care what the makers think.