We're all perverts to some extent, but it's hard to beat Larry Laffer at sleaziness.
You have to give the guy some credit though, he's just trying to get laid. His ways are funny, desperate and perverted, characteristics that made him a star of the gaming world. |
Larry’s story began more than 25 years ago in the distant (how the time flies) 1987, when the first of the many games came out. It was created by Al Lowe, a musician with a talent for programming.
Our hero, a nerd and a computer programmer, lived with his mom and his brother for 38 years. In that time he became obsessed with dirty magazines, a habit which cost him his job. Soon after, his mom decided she wanted to travel, so she sold her house. Larry, with not many options left, decided to sell his car and headed to the city of sin for search of love. An unconventional main character and dirty plot lines made the game franchise a big hit. Naturally, sequels came rather quickly, and today, when adventure games are on life support, many old-school gamers fondly remember their efforts to get our leisure suit friend laid. 1. Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (1987) The first game begins when Larry comes to the city of Lost Wages (Las Vegas). There is no major story line. You (Larry) just browse around in a pathetic search of getting laid. With his leisure suit and 94$ in his pocket, he tries the impossible: get any girl he meets into bed. At first the sales were very slow, selling only 4,000 copies. The game content was too hardcore for sellers and advertisers, although it’s not that dirty by today’s standards. But soon things started to change, word spread around and by the end of the year 250,000 copies were sold. Larry became a hit. Remake came fairly quickly, in 1991. The game used new Sierra’s engine with 256 colors instead of 16. Gameplay stayed more or less the same. Another remake came out in 2013, adding new graphics, audio and gameplay. Funds for it were raised through Kickstarter and expectations were high. Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded faced mediocre reviews and did not meet the anticipations of fans, mainly due to lack of new content in comparison to the original game. 2. Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places) (1988) The sequel came out in 1988, shortly after the first game. The first Larry game faced plenty of criticism due to its edgy content, so Sierra decided to tone down the dirty jokes, purely for the sake of puritanism. The jokes are still in the spirit of the first game, but that’s about it. The Storyline is more complex though. It used new Sierra’s graphic engine, the same one that was used in King’s Quest IV. 3. Leisure Suit Larry III: Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals (1989) This one came out one year after the second installment. Our friend is working on a tropical island in a high class resort. He gets dumped by his wife (yes, he got married!) for another woman. He also loses his job. Disappointed, he goes to a phone booth where he changes his clothes from a Hawaiian shirt back to his leisure suit. Storyline is (duh!) full of fun, plus there is also one more playable character besides Larry. Sierra realized that the course they went with in Leisure Suit Larry 2 wasn’t what made the original a hit, so they returned to more adult content. The game uses the same engine as it was used in Leisure Suit Larry 2. 4. Leisure Suit Larry V: Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work (1991) As there was no formal forth part, the title of the next chapter on our list is misleading. There were several supposed reasons for that. The first one is that the original content for the fourth installment got lost and the programmers didn’t want to create it from scratch again. Other sources claimed it’s just an internal office prank. In 2012 Al Lowe stated that he intentionally left out “the forth part”, as Larry’s story was nicely circled in the first three games and he didn’t want to tap into that. So he skipped a part and just created the 5th part with new plot lines, mainly ignoring the ending of the third one. In this chapter, our favorite sleazeball is in the adult film industries. Graphics and interface were much improved and it was the first time Larry can’t die. 5. Leisure Suit Larry VI: Shape Up or Slip Out! (1994) When voice acting became standard for adventure games, developers had a problem with picking the right voices. In the dawn of computer games, when voice acting was far away, everyone imagined how the characters sounded. With Larry, developers nailed it, although I’m sure some people weren’t so excited when they first heard our Leisure Suit friend. His voice is a little bit goofy, but all in all the game sounds great. We follow his attempts to get laid in a health spa. He’s not very successful, as ladies mainly exploit him in many (nonsexual) ways. With its gameplay, Leisure Suit Larry VI: Shape up or Slip Out returned to its roots. There was no major storyline, like in the previous installment, the main “plot” is just seducing any lady you meet. Also, our antagonist can die again. 6.Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail! (1996) For majority of people, this is the best of the legendary series. Beautiful cartoony graphics look awesome even by today’s standards. The plot revolves around Larry’s experience on a cruise ship. There is a contest going on, and whoever wins will spend a week with the ship’s captain, a beautiful blonde woman. The ship is filled with parodies of famous people, like Dewmi Moore, Drew Baringmore, Jamie Lee Coitus and others. In 2007, the mobile version of the game came out, with a different plot from the original. As the adventure genre slowly but surely faded away, so did Larry, except in the hearts of gamers who grew up in the 90s. If you’re a young gamer who never played any of these games, try it, you’ll get lots of laughs from this legendary series. Check out Larry games, books and much more. |
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