Leisure Suit Larry

Who else played those Sierra erotic-comedy adventure games? When I was much younger, I really loved graphic adventure games, and discovered them through the original Police Quest.



So I was lucky to find a compilation CD of all six titles from Leisure Suit Larry 1 to Leisure Suit Larry 7! (yes, they intentionally skipped a number)

Going through the "Prove you're an adult" quiz was quite a feat! Especially when the quiz is American-centric! Especially when it is 1980s-centric!


Of course, them being Sierra games, the earlier titles had a lot of bullshit puzzles where you can't proceed and have to restart because you forgot an easily missable item (like that stupid needle hidden in a plate of food!).



But I liked the universe, the characters, the atmosphere... it still was likable, and funny...


I played those games when I was barely a teenager... so a LOT of the jokes went over my head! Haha!

"Thank you for coming so fast!
I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard THAT!"

Note: there NEVER were piss-poor 3D sequels.

 

The recent remake of Larry 1 felt sloppy in its animations and my god does it make the original show its age

 

Yeah, I didn't like this one... it didn't feel professionally-made, and they got a bit too excited about inserting dozens and dozens of description jokes. It gets a bit overwhelming.

What is it with modern adventure game remakes on iOS that feel cheap/sloppy despite the attempts to "enhance" it? Like the tendency for the character walks to move like they are sliding on ice instead of actually putting a foot in front of the other?

 

What sucks is that like MCL (which had funny jokes, a nice world but trash gameplay) it had potential. Much of the animations have what I dub as Hammerman syndrome where only the main frames on some animations are animated, and the quality is inconsistent. Larry's idle animation is well executed but many others on multiple characters only have one or two frames

 

Oh yes, I'm member berrying hard right now.

(An experience not wholly unfamiliar to me!)

1 is hilarious if a bit short and the VGA/SCI version is the best one (although they cut out the suicide from virginity bit that the Legovision original had.)

2 is not as funny as it wants to be and has too many stupid unwinnable sections.

3 is brilliant all round and thankfully there aren't really any unwinnable bits unless you, as Patti, forget to grab your stockings and then have no way of descending the marijuana cliff (it makes sense in context). The deaths are more like easter eggs than actual "I fucked up" sequences.

5 is... well, let's draw a veil over that.

6 is brilliant. It basically continues the formula from 3 of Larry tries to pull women, it goes horribly wrong / right. Easter egg deaths as well, my favourites being if you repeatedly try to pull up the personal trainer's top where she punches Larry into the rafters, and if you use the toilet seat cover, the lingerie catalogue, and the hand lotion in that order, Larry dies of embarrassment as every other character in the game walks into frame and sees him wanking himself furiously.

7 likewise. Although totally deathless.

Magna Cum Laude and that trashfire that came out in 2009 that sullied the name of the franchise were pants and shall not be considered here.

 

Wow, it's almost exactly my opinion on these games too!!

Except I never felt like playing Magna Cum Laude and Box Office Bust. And it seemed my spider-sense proved me right!!

 

This may be more obscure, but the Hero's Quest games were my jam back in the day. Colonel's Bequest deserves a mention too.

 

It's funny how blatant the Sierra adventure games were into making "shout-outs" to each other back in those days. I feel like they were even less subtle than Lucas Arts in that regard.

 

I think it was because Sierra designers all worked on each others' games so there was quite a bit of cross pollination. But on the other hand it could mean that, esp. with Kings Quest being written by the boss, and Roberta Williams being by all accounts a bit of an egotist, nobody dared tell her that spiral stairways should not be a major challenge to get up, finding a boot in the desert on a random number generator is bad design, and that Cedric the Owl should not exist on any plane whatever. Because none of the other Sierra series had the same design clangers as KQ. LSL dropped most of the really awful unwinnable segments after the second one and went to Easter egg deaths. QFG had no unwinnable states apart from one in QFG2 which really requires violation of common sense to make happen. Space Quest had some but it usually lampshaded them.

 

Ah Leisure Suit Larry... My first exposure to that game was back when people were screaming about how offensive and sexist it was without realizing that was the point and it was a humor game, not a sex simulator.

 

I tried the PS2 game but I found it boring and lackluster thanks to its annoying minigame system.

 

No wonder I never finished a King's Quest game after the two first ones! You can only "unwin" so many times before you really get bored with it.

Thank goodness times changed since then, eh?

Eh?

You mean Magna Cum Laude?? Oh god, I am not surprised!! Stick with the TRUE and HONEST Larry Laffer, not Larry Lovage!

 

Yes, Magna Cum Laude.
A textbook example of how minigames are bad game mechanics when they become the core element.
I read that the sequel is horrible also.

 

I've heard scary things about Box Office Bust; I am not touching this one or Magna Cum Laude with a fifteen-foot pole.

Even Al Lowe, the original creator, said about these games that it was like reading a ransom letter from a criminal who kidnapped your child. On one hand, you are glad he is still alive, but on the other hand, you think "My god, look what they've done to him!"

By the way...

 

To be fair, MCL did have a fun world to explore and the jokes while even more sophmoric then the Al Lowe games still elicit a chuckle.