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Leisure Suit Larry 3: Passionate Passi In
Pursuit Of The Pulsating Pectorals |
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Studio: |
Sierra
On-Line |
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Designer(s): |
Al
Lowe |
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Part of series: |
Leisure
Suit Larry |
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Release: |
April 8, 1989 |
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Main credits: |
Programming: Al Lowe, Juan Carlos Escobar |
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Useful links: |
Playthrough: Part 1 |
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Damned if you do, damned if
you don’t: allegedly, after having to endure right-wing criticism for the
depravity of the original Leisure Suit
Larry, Al received quite a few letters from disappointed fans complaining
about the lack of depravity in the follow-up
game — humor and satire and KGB guys in trench coats notwithstanding, what,
after all, was the point of playing a Leisure Suit Larry game if you totally weren’t
going to (not) get laid? I personally remember very well the pangs of
sorrowful disappointment in Moscow academic circles, which were somehow
influencing even the totally underage 13-year old me in the year 1989, when
even the Berlin Wall came down, yet the poor Larry Laffer still got no action. It was clear enough that the people had
to be given what they wanted, and to hell with the PMRC. Yet at the same time
Al already had some clear ideas about where he wanted to go next — at the
very end of Larry 2, you were
introduced to an odd minor character who played piano for the evil Dr.
Nonookee, called herself «Polyester Patti» (sic!), and promised Larry that
she would be playing an important part in his future. I have a sneaky
suspicion that Al’s decision to share Larry’s screen time with a female
playable character may have been driven by two concerns — (a) being jealous
of Roberta Williams’ success with Princess Rosella and (b) deciding that an
active, «strong» female character in a Larry game might take a bit of
feminist criticism off his back. Neither of these goals was really achieved:
Passionate Patti never made anybody’s «Top 10 (100) List of Strong Female
Characters In Video Games», and the way she was portrayed in the game could
only placate the kind of feminist who thinks it’s totally okay for strong
women to give doormen blowjobs in order to gain entrance to a male strip club
(!), in other words, no one. And
even so, Passionate Patti became a unique and intriguing element in the
hitherto rather plastic feminine area of Larry Laffer’s world — and a
perfectly symmetric female character to outbalance the male perspective. As such, Leisure Suit Larry 3 became a synthesis of the old and the new:
the first part of the game naturally brought back to mind Larry’s
inauspicious girl adventures in Lost Wages, while the second one suddenly
transformed it into an Indiana Jones-style jungle crossing, while still
somehow managing to retain a mildly lewd flavor. Largely dispensing with the
«plot» device of the previous game, it concentrated on the double punch of
Al’s trademark satirical humor and digital titillation, but with the addition
of Patti as a playable character and with a few extra twists (such as the
thoroughly unpredictable finale), still managed to avoid crashing down into
totally predictable formula, as would be the fate of all the subsequent Larry
games after the franchise’s revival in 1991. Speaking of revivals, it is important
to remember that in 1989, Larry 3
was indeed meant to be the final chapter in the saga of Larry Laffer: after
two unsuccessful attempts to find love and happiness with a permanent partner
(Eve and Kalalau), Larry finally discovers an ideal lover in Passionate Patti,
settles down for good and even begins to immortalize his biography in a
series of video games. It was a wise decision at the time: the game did
synthesize elements of the previous two, but it was clear that Al had already
started repeating himself in a lot of ways, and it made perfect sense to
retire our balding (and finally somewhat satisfied) hero before he began
turning into a complete parody of his old self. Alas, cruel and unflinching
laws of the market would soon overturn that decision — but at least the
original game trilogy turned out to be well-rounded, satisfactory, and
self-sufficient. Whether you want to buy into the whole «Larry 2.0» image
that began two years later or not is irrelevant to the autonomous quality of Larry 3 as the logical finale to the
Leisure Suit Larry story arc. |
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Content evaluation |
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Although the storyline of Larry 3 does pick up from exactly
where we left our guy at the end of Larry
2 — that is, on the imaginary Polynesian island of Nontoonyt, enjoying a
seemingly carefree life with his beloved wife Kalalau and even donning a
brand new Hawaiian shirt instead of his trademark leisure suit — it very
quickly becomes obvious that the thriller-type story of Larry 2 will no longer detract the protagonist from pursuing his
primary goal in life. Instead, our girl Kalalau quickly and unceremoniously
dumps Larry for an «Amazonian Harley-riding former-cannibal lesbian
slot-machine repairwoman» (right!), shattering his faith in marital fidelity
and setting him back on the tried and true path of screwing everything that
moves — or, rather, of failing to screw everything that moves in a variety of
unpredictable ways. Yes, your biggest thrill for the majority of this game
will be trying to guess the exact manner in which Larry’s coitus will be
interruptus, over and over again... and sometimes, you will guess wrong, because Al Lowe’s sick, twisted mind is a
challenger not to be taken lightly. That said, Al wouldn’t be Al, and Larry 3 wouldn’t be a true Larry
game, if all the humor always centered around dick jokes (though, hey, some
of the dick jokes are actually funny — you can type "show dick" in
front of some of the girls and at least one will react with something like
"war injury, Larry?"... ahem, never mind). A major plot device in
the game is the wild and intense commercialization in Nontoonyt, which Larry,
by getting rid of Dr. Nonookee, has inadvertently opened up to corporate
gluttony — which the native population is only too happy to embrace, as
souvenir sellers keep roaming the island advertising "special souvenir
seashells", "no longer contaminated with that crude oil/sewage mixture
we call ocean water". Larry himself is both a victim of this process,
losing his job after falling out with Kalalau, and a beneficiary — when it
comes to exploiting the mercantile weaknesses of the isle’s population to his
own advantage. All of the girls encountered by our
hero are slightly more advanced (compared to the first game) stereotypes,
including the ditzy bimbo shopaholic (Tawni), the introverted romantic
showgirl (Cherri), the permanently busy kinky lawyer lady (Suzi), and the
not-too-brainy, but hyper-energetic aerobics instructor (Bambi). They are
there largely for the laughs, and their behavior and dialog peculiarities are
very much tied to the late Eighties, but then again, the late Eighties did
happen, and they did give us some ditzy bimbos and energetic aerobics
instructors — in some ways, these girls still behave more realistically than Seinfeld characters. The only woman
who emerges out of this sea of parody as a wholesome persona is, of course,
Passionate Patti herself... and once you finally manage to conquer her heart,
you are treated to the biggest surprise of them all: after an unfortunate
misunderstanding, a frustrated Larry wanders off into the jungle, and now you
play as Passionate Patti, determined to find and bring back her man at any cost... even if it means losing
all her money and most of her
clothing in the process. The Passionate Patti Part of the Plot
is, admittedly, a bit confusing, as Al keeps jumping between the playgirl, if
not downright escort-like, nature of Patti and her romantic-faithful
girlfriend qualities — one minute, you are supposed to be wooing a handsome
male stripper at the local club, the next minute you bravely head out to the
jungle in order to risk your possessions, sanity, and very life to bring back
the man of your dreams. Still, Patti’s trek through the jungle makes for a
nice change of pace and scenery, echoing Larry’s own journey through the
jungle in the previous game, and Al has to be commended on how subtly he
combines adventure with striptease, never forgetting that a Larry game always
has to be sexy while not always having to be about sex (a principle that
would, unfortunately, be all but abandoned for the next few games). Finally, the plot-ending twist, while
certainly giving us a deus-ex-machina vibe, fulfills the important function
of fitting Leisure Suit Larry inside the Sierra On-Line universe, the same
way Space Quest III did with Roger
Wilco and his creators — and the twist itself is a loving, friendly,
sarcastic jab at nearly all of Sierra’s franchises to that day, though
Roberta Williams gets most of the flack for the infamous whale tongue puzzle
of King’s Quest IV. By the time
the ending strides in, you almost manage to forget you were playing a game in
which the main objective was, at one time, to get laid — and that, by itself,
makes Leisure Suit Larry 3 a very
special entry in the Al Lowe canon. |
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Despite the increased length and the
novel two-character perspective, Larry
3 is not at all difficult — in fact, arguably the most difficult puzzle
comes at the very beginning, with the return of «age verification» questions
inherited from the first game. These are actually quite hilarious («Pearl
Harbor is best known for: a. being a great place to shop for necklaces, b.
her five years as a Washington D. C. madam, c. being bombed during World War
II, d. her singing voice»), but require major
familiarity with much of 1960s and 1970s pop culture (Josephine the Plumber?
The Dry Look?) which is getting harder and harder as the years go by, let
alone trying to play the game in a foreign country (such as the USSR!). Of
course, you are allowed to fail — but then you only get to play the game at
one of the lower levels of Filthiness, rather than the coveted «Totally
Raunchiest» level, and where is the fun in that? (Note: you can also cheat, but in those pre-Internet days you
could only get the cheat code by word of mouth). Once you are past the screening,
though, the overall puzzle difficulty is slightly below the level of Larry 2. Beating the main game is
easy — as long as you take your time to carefully survey all the environments
and grab everything that is not nailed down, there are, at best, one or two
spots which might require, uh, creative thinking (such as producing an
authentic Nontoonyt souvenir for the junk-hungry Tawni, or the feral pig
encounter in the jungle). What is definitely not so easy is obtaining all the
4000 points in the game (yes, there are
4000 points, Al was probably trying to set a Guinness record here): there are
many optional things that can easily be missed — in fact, out of the four
pre-Patti girl encounters, two are completely unnecessary to advance the main
plot, and one in particular, a liaison with the island’s stern lady lawyer,
can only be triggered by a very particular and odd circumstance which you can
very easily overlook. Frustrating dead ends are not as
frequent in Larry 3 as they were
in Larry 2, mainly because we are
here in more of an «open world» environment, where you can always go back and
pick up something you forgot without any serious penalties. You can screw up
intentionally (for instance, give away important objects to various people
for no reason at all), but the only genuinely cruel device in the Larry part
of the game is the gym locker — forget to close it upon heading to the shower
and you will be doomed to forever navigating the little locker maze in Adam’s
costume. As for the Patti part of the game, the important point of no return
is when you cross from the «civilized» into the «wild» part of Nontoonyt —
forget to pack even one important piece of clothing, and you will never leave
the jungle alive. Literally dead ends are just as frequent as in
any other Sierra game, though, so it is predictably important to save all the
time (there is even an auto-reminder for the player to save which you can
turn off and on — a first, I think, in any Sierra game). And while most of
the fatalities are predictable (like, don’t fall over a cliff or go swimming
into the polluted ocean or get trampled by a wild boar), some continue to be
unnecessarily cruel — occasionally, even a simple and innocent knock on a
closed door can end in tragedy. At least Al has plenty of hilarious messages
to send you off into the next world... and yes, that’s the Sierra thing, just
remember to save before trying just about anything
other than "take wood from ground" and you shall be fine. Finally, there is always the issue of
non-adventure components in adventure games — mazes and arcades, in this
particular case. One such «puzzle» is just tedious (at some point, Larry is
expected to pump up his pectorals and get ripped, which simply requires
pushing the up and down arrows as many times as your CPU requires from you),
but when you get to the Patti part, you actually get assignments that require
more brain action — such as navigate a lengthy bamboo maze (prepare to die
multiple times, it’s almost unavoidable unless you cheat) and, later on,
float down a lengthy river on a log while avoiding various obstacles
(including Patti’s "worst nightmare — CHILDREN!"). That sequence,
by the way, is relatively well programmed and requires a small pinch of
creative strategic thinking — today, it is actually a little more fun to play
because you do not have to wait an eternity to restore the game on your
slow-ass Intel 286 PC. You can skip it, too, except you shall have to say
goodbye to the full 4000 points in that case. |
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In contrast with Larry 2, all of this game takes place in one location — Nontoonyt
Island, recently civilized on the edges but still wild and pristine enough in
the middle. This means the overall atmosphere will be weirdly contrastive,
with Larry spending most of his walking hours treking through jungle paths
but always ending up in some fashionably modernized office building,
showroom, barroom, or entertainment venue in the end. (This would later be
lightly reprised with the La Costa Lotta setting in Larry 6, but natural wildness in that game would be confined to
the utmost periphery). The produced effect is rather unique — Mogambo meets Mad Men, if you wish — and I remember how it used to sweeten the
pill of having to backtrack through parts of that jungle in the old days of
super-slow PCs. Of course, the main atmosphere is
provided, as usual, by Al’s humor. Sometimes it peeps through in the form of
cheap little sexy flourishes (gee, you can spy on a woman undressing in her
hotel room!), but just as often it breaks out in a major tidal wave, such as
Paul Paul’s stand-up cabaret show, brought back from Then there are the girls, which are in
general a major improvement over the ones in the first game — and no, they
have not become less stereotypical, but the stereotypes have become more
fleshed out, if you know what I mean. The number of possible dialog
interactions has significantly grown, and topics of interest might include
anything from the weather to intimate parts of your anatomy — except that,
this being a text parser game and all, there are no obvious dialog choices,
meaning that you will have to experiment. The AI is still lame, but it is
much less lame than it was a couple of years before — one can only guess how
advanced it would have become in another couple of years, had not Sierra made
the tragic decision to eliminate the parser altogether. All in all, while this is hardly
something to get excited about in the modern age, I do remember the game
being significantly progressive in terms of depth back in its time. With Larry 2, the emphasis was on looking
around and trying to quickly get to the next place. With Larry 3, you actually wanted to spend some time in those places,
even if there might actually be less to do than in Larry 2. |
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Technical features |
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With only one year separating Larry 2 from Larry 3, it would hardly be realistic to expect serious changes
in the graphic aspect, yet things did not sit completely still, either. The
static backdrops actually look a bit more detailed and juicy than they did in
Larry 2 — the jungle, for
instance, is more dense and colorful than it used to be, giving the
impression of a place where it is really easy to get lost. Most of the
interiors are also more densely cluttered with (usually recognizable)
objects, reaching its peak in the last section of the game where Larry and
Patti wander around the Sierra prop storage room. The biggest achievement, of course, are
the girls. Since Larry is back to his swinging ways, this means a return to
the world of close-ups, and it must be said that these particular close-ups
look quite impressive — if, occasionally, a bit scary — for their age. Most
importantly, the faces are now almost fully animated — both the eyes and the
mouth have their own independent dynamics, and some of these look quite
realistic as the girls roll their eyes in indignation or pout their lips in
admiration. (Do not forget to "make a joke" in front of each of the
girls — this is not something most players would probably realize to do on
their own, but it does get you an additional hilarious, if a bit disgusting,
facial reaction from most of them). So maybe Cherri Tart, the dancer, does
look a little like your mother, but this may
have been intentional (why should every showroom queen look like a 20-year
old?), and Suzi Cheatem, the lawyer, does look like she just wants to
dominate you, but this most certainly was
intentional (isn’t that what all lawyers do anyway?). I do remember falling
hopelessly in love with the green eyes and blonde hair of Bambi, the aerobics
instructor, and being seriously disappointed about how the curves of her
little sprite never really matched the ideal contours of her close-up face. Speaking of sprites, though, these,
too, have been fleshed out relatively well: our friend Larry comes in two
different shapes (pot-bellied and slim) and lots of different costumes
(including FULL FRONTAL NUDITY!... if only inside the locker room, shush),
and he looks fresher and more inspiring than ever, a little sprightlier and
younger even than in the previous game (guess that witchdoctor tonic was
still going strong). For Patti, the graphic artists ensured that all the
proper curves be in place, though everything in general is very decent. The
other girls have been treated with less attention, which is excusable due to
their limited presence on the screen. And oh yes, the amount of flesh and
lewd posing that you get will be directly dependent on the «filth level» you
have earned by answering the opening questions — however, even on the
«Totally Raunchiest» level you are not going to be exposed to anything much
(I believe there isn’t even a single topless scene in the entire game, as
compared to Larry 2 where you did
have a quick glimpse at the end of the show). |
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Larry
3 arrived at a time
when it became customary for Sierra to provide full soundtracks for their
games, meaning that this time around, you are going to be accompanied by
music wherever you are. This meant actually hiring a separate composer,
rather than letting Al Lowe himself do all the work; in this case, the
composer is a certain Mike Dana, who seems to have absolutely nothing to his
name except for this particular soundtrack — but it is still a decent
soundtrack, nothing genius but perfectly functional. The music ranges from
moody «jungle exotica» (played, of course, in the jungle) to inobtrusively
sprightly elevator muzak (played, of course, in elevators) to repetitively
annoying, but catchy jazz-pop (played in office buildings and entertainment
venues). Some of the selections are quite bizarre: I still do not understand,
for instance, why the Feral Pig Theme is a variation on the classic Peter
Gunn Theme, though hearing its boogie rhythm in the middle of all that other
tribal-styled ambience of the jungle is quite a hoot. The classic Larry theme has been
modified as well — especially in its full-fledged MIDI version, it is now
embellished with extra bells and whistles (additional intro section;
thoroughly rewritten bridge section; more and more melodic flourishes
throughout), which kicks wide open the tradition of mutating the old theme
more and more in each following game until it becomes nearly unrecognizable.
I am not sure I fully agree with that decision — a classic is a classic — but
at least this time around, the core chords are still intact, and I can live
with the extra intro bars, I guess. Other than the music, there is nothing
to talk about: voice acting is still a long way away, and sound effects are
kept to a pragmatic minimum (ringing phones and chirping birds). But then,
perhaps, the more is left to your imagination, the better? Those sex sounds
in Larry 7 can get pretty annoying (not to mention the relative
inconvenience of playing at home with your wife in the next room). |
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Interface Gameplay is standard early SCI-era:
move around with the cursor (or mouse, still fairly clumsy), pause the game
whenever you open the parser to type in a command. The trademark Al Lowe
Option, instead of the «trite phrase» of Larry
2, is now amended to «expletive» (son
of a bitch! by default for the Totally Raunchy level), which you can set
to whatever you like, from holy Moses
to cocksucking motherfucker, but
the puerile excitement wears off rather quickly. As usual, pressing the Boss
Key for some reason requires you to restore or restart a game. Also, you can
now change the default text color if you wish — gee! The parser has largely been fixed, so
that there will be no annoying bugs such as the ones that plagued Larry 2; however, making use of all
the extra abilities of the parser is still made difficult by some weird
programming decisions. For instance, while the dialog capacity of the girls
is significantly enhanced compared to the first game, realising these options
is tricky — e.g. in some cases, the parser will recognize something like
"weather" but not "ask about weather", or
"date" but not "make a date" or "go on date",
quite odd compared to the more streamlined and coherent approach in such
contemporary games as, for instance, The
Colonel’s Bequest (which placed a huge emphasis on dialog and perfectly
knew the difference between "talk to X", "ask X about Y",
and "tell X about Y"). Even today, I still come across some of the
girls’ responses to certain topics inside the game script without having any
idea of how to actually trigger them. Alas, it is precisely this blatant
negligence towards a very simple task — slightly enhancing the linguistic
component of the game — that ultimately led to abandoning the text parser and
switching to the less demanding point-and-click interface. |
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It is quite ironic that, while Larry 2 and Larry 3 are unquestionably my favorite games in the entire
series, they are precisely the ones that are least often talked about even in
retrospective-nostalgic surveys on adventure games — people usually discuss
either the first game, for its introduction of the character, or about the
last two, as the ones that were the most advanced from a technical
perspective (graphics, voice acting, etc.). What they forget about is that
the best plots, the best atmospheres, probably the best humor, the most
daring genre-hopping, and, if I might say, the most social relevance are all
to be found in these 1988-89 titles. Larry
3 might not be as bold and outrageous as Larry 2, but it makes a good synthesis of all the strong sides of
its predecessors while dropping some of their technical flaws — and while it
is not entirely self-sufficient on its own (you really need to play the first
two games in order to understand what it is all about), it provides a
perfectly satisfactory ending to Larry’s story arc, combining elements of
lewd satire/parody and sentimental romance tale in such a manner that it
really makes you care about the characters and laugh your ass off at
them and the silly world they live in at the same time. And kudos to Al for
coming up with Passionate Patti, one of those Strong Female Characters
With A Grain Of Salt which would be pretty much unimaginable in any of
today’s mainstream video games — hell of a reason to replay a 1989 game
thirty years later, I’d say. |
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