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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: |
November 26, 1996 |
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Main credits: |
Programmers: Steve Conrad, Mark Martino |
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Useful links: |
Complete
playthrough, parts 1-7 (6 hours
26 mins.) |
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One could hardly accuse Al
Lowe of slacking in the mid-Nineties, nor even of sticking exclusively to a
proven formula. At the same time that he was working on the sixth Larry game,
he was also busy putting his touch on Freddy
Pharkas, his (and Josh Mandel’s) humorous take on the Western genre; and
after both these games finally shipped, his next project was Torin’s Passage, not a comedy per se
but rather an idosyncratic piece of fantasy with comedic elements. Indeed,
one might have thought that the dear old joker would show enough sense to
finally put poor Mr. Laffer to rest — given that Larry 6, while hardly a bad game on its own, pretty much just
rebooted the character to his original personality and line of occupation
from the first game, the only big difference being that the protagonist was
finally given a voice, and that the girls looked far more seductive in the
era of VESA than they did in the era of CGA. Yet the fans continued to make their
voices heard, and the market presented its own demands — and, honestly, nobody
in the whole wide world can run a good idea into the ground with as much
persistency as Mr. Lowe (as of 2020, he is still regularly posting one or two dirty jokes on social media almost every day; the jokes themselves
ceased to be funny at least a couple of decades ago, but we’re all here
pining for Al to make the Guinness record all the same). And thus, some time
in late 1995 or early 1996, just as Sierra On-Line was being sold to CUC
International and the timer was set for detonation, Al set out to design yet
another Leisure Suit Larry adventure — which, this time around, happened to
be his last one for a very long time. I suppose that Al did not spend too
much time wrecking his brain over any new directions, plot twists, or
personality features for Leisure Suit Larry. The reboot of the franchise
worked well with buyers and critics alike, so why bother? All he had to do
was design a new location — say, a luxury cruise ship instead of a luxury spa
resort — then rinse and repeat the basic formula: Larry meets a bunch of
girls > Larry satisfies the girls’ demands > Larry gets rejected by
each and every girl in a humorous and sadistic fashion > Larry accumulates
enough experience to get the top girl > PROFIT. In between, just insert
every new dirty joke you come up with or overhear during your everyday life,
and voilà. In Al’s defense, he at least tried — just like he did with
Larry 6 — to make the whole thing
into an interesting game. Unlike most other Sierra artists at the time, he
designed his own interface, rather than follow the general King’s Quest VII model; he came up with
several new ideas to allow for a different kind of interactivity between the
game and the player; he even put the egg back in the Easter egg, if you know
what I mean (and if you do not, just read on)! With graphics and sound up to
par for the standards of 1996 as well, it would be hard to claim that Love For Sail! represented nothing but
creative stagnation; and like each and every one of Sierra’s Larry games, it
sold reasonably well, maybe even more
than reasonably well, you know, in the age of Bill Clinton and everything. Critical response, however, was mixed.
With memories of Larry 6 still
relatively fresh in the minds of picky reviewers, many of them dismissed the
game as uninspired, repetitive, and more or less obsolete. Al brushed these
criticisms aside — to him, if something is good, it can never become obsolete — and got busy on the eighth game, which
was going to be in 3D (a very brief trailer bit exists, and it looks
predictably awful), and which, fortunately, got cancelled in 1999 with
Sierra’s downfall. What this meant, however, was that Love For Sail! would be the last ever Al Lowe / Sierra Leisure
Suit Larry game — and this, in turn, meant that it would be in a position to
get recommended to casual players every time they asked around for a good
adventure game from the past decade. Because, you know, in an old video game
franchise it is always the last
game that’s got to be recommended, right? The one that looks and feels the
least like crap out of them all? Indeed, in far more than one entertainment
source that I have encountered, any mention of Leisure Suit Larry tends to be
illustrated by a reference to Love For
Sail!; and if any nostalgic best-of list of adventure games decides to
include a Larry game (which does not happen often), it is usually Love For Sail!. This is totally not
right. As we shall see, there are quite a few things to like about the game,
and, indeed, it is the one Larry game that still looks half-decent (though, naturally, it could still use a good
remastering). But as a work of, er, uhm, art,
it is so deeply secondary and shallow that recommending it over the original
trilogy is like inviting listeners to try out the genius of the Beatles by
picking up the latest McCartney solo album — and why not? doesn’t it boast
all the benefits of modern recording and production standards?.. |
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Content evaluation |
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Here we go again. To ensure a bit of
continuity from Larry 6 (not that
this was necessary in the least), we pick up at exactly the spot where we
were left at the end of that game — Larry’s night of hard-earned bliss with
Shamara Payne — only to discover that her entire New Age schtick was, in
fact, nothing more than a con act to relieve our unfortunate protagonist of
all of his money and leave him handcuffed to her luxurious bed with a lit
cigarette in his mouth. (Considering that throughout the entirety of Larry 6, the character did not have a
single red cent to his name, that greenback-stuffed wallet came totally out
of nowhere, but tightness of the plot was not particularly relevant to Al
Lowe even at the creative peak of the franchise, and became completely
irrelevant in later years). Naturally, this leads to Larry accidentally
setting the room on fire and, after getting rid of the handcuffs, being
obligated to make a dashing jump out of the window. At least this is a
somewhat more action-packed twist on the classic «at the beginning of Larry X, Larry gets dumped by the love
of his life that he successfully wooed at the end of Larry X-1» trope; but we kinda sorta saw
that trope buried after Larry 3,
and having it resurrected here isn’t exactly the most auspicious start to a
new Larry game. So much for the past. As to the future,
well, on his way out of the burning hotel, Larry stumbles upon a ticket to a
luxury cruise — no idea whose, or how he would be able to get aboard if it is
not in his name, but, again, who gives a damn? — and immediately makes good
on it. Turns out that not only is the ship predictably jam-packed by gorgeous
women, all of them open to the suggestion of getting it on with a sleazy,
balding, middle-aged penniless loser, but that its blonde-haired,
Disney-faced Captain Thygh runs a regular contest among the passengers —
whosoever scores the most on his or her application card, gets to spend a lot
of quality time with the Captain in her personal suite (while the ship just
runs on autopilot). This sets in motion the main engine of the game — since
Larry is way too unfit, unhip, and unqualified in all pertinent matters, your
task is to help him cheat his way through all the competitions and emerge as
the ultimate Lord of the Thygh (pardon the Aerosmithy pun). In between
cheating, he can also make passes at the many «secondary» ladies on the
cruise, some of which may (unintentionally) assist him with his cheating, but
none of which (well, almost none of
which) will get him any closer to getting laid, as per the standard formula
requirements of a Larry game. That’s pretty much it as far as the
plot is concerned. This time around, nothing about it makes even the least
bit of rational sense — to the extent that you have to believe it was all
intentional on Al’s part. If you thought that La Costa Lotta from Larry 6 was an absurd location with
caricaturesque characters and activities, wait till you see the P.M.S. Bouncy
(yes, that is the name of the ship; how could
it possibly be anything else?) where you can pick kumquats off sheep
topiaries, wear elephant trunk swimsuits to the pool, take part in Blind
Dessert Taste Tests, get your bowling pins whittled out by real live beavers,
listen to President Clinton tell boatloads of dirty jokes, and I haven’t even
mentioned the competitions yet: one of these, for instance, is about tossing
horseshoes which you take off the foot of a centaur statue after inserting
your test card deep inside his ass — just hope you don’t die of healthy,
wholesome laughter along the way. I can certainly understand Al’s desire
to drive the absurdity quotient of the game all the way up to eleven: formula
or no formula, the idea of pushing his «art» forward and conquering new
heights rather than being quite content with staying on the same plateau was
clearly on his mind. The problem is that sometimes there is such a thing as too much — by making the surrounding
environments, activities, and characters ever more ridiculous, he ended up
completely forsaking the satirical aspects of the Larry games. At least the
girls in Larry 6 were all more or
less sensible parodies of existing stereotypes — the Latina immigrant, the
buffed-up dominatrix, the country-western diva, the single-minded fitness
instructor, etc. etc. By contrast, in Larry
7 the characters seem more like parodies of parodies, with the game not
so much poking fun at actual categories of people as exaggerating the
characteristics of their cartoonish reflections already well depicted in all
sorts of comedic entertainment. Thus, in the place of Burgundy from Larry 6, a genuinely funny parody on
the free-spirited country-western singer, we have the unlikely
mother-daughter duo of «Nailmi» and «Wydoncha» «Juggs» (har har har), whose
trademarks are their giant heads of hair, apparently produced by the largest
can of hairspray in existence; songs with titles like ‘He’s Got His Daddy’s
Eyes And His Other Daddy’s Smile’; and, naturally, the «juggs» in question,
with cleavages that can swallow up a Leisure Suit Larry whole. It’s not even
that the jokes and puns are not funny — technically, they are — it’s that
they no longer make fun of actual people. Similarly, the ship’s librarian,
aptly named «Victorian Principles», is pictured as a parody of the stereotype
of the Prude Librarian; once you have successfully converted her to the dark
side, releasing the beast inside by slipping an erotic novel on top of her
to-read list, she becomes a parody of the stereotype of Kinky Girl. This is
the kind of subject you can probably easily encounter in a porn comedy —
which is perfectly okay by me, with the little reservation that Leisure Suit Larry, in its best days,
was quite far removed from the level of a porn comedy. The one positive side of all this
«meta» spirit is that it is virtually impossible to get offended at any of
the allegedly sexist or racist jokes in the game (well, impossible, that is,
for people who do not find the meaning of life in getting offended by
everyone and everything) — simply because they are not aimed at actual sex or
race, but rather at an already distorted perception of sex and race. For
instance, soon enough you will stumble into a Chinese cook called Wang
(naturally), speaking in a caricature Chinese accent, but after Larry catches
him slipping into a normal manner of speach, he acknowledges that
"people stare when I speak normally, so I’ve found it simpler just to
sound like some bad Charlie Chan impersonator". (That’s actually a big
step up for Al from his ethnic
stereotypes in the first couple of Larry games). The same can be said about
the cartoonishly gay Peter the Purser (even more cartoonishly so than Gary
the Towel Attendant in Larry 6), or
the grotesquely foul-mouthed Peggy the Janitor — sort of a cross between
Blackbeard, Courtney Love, and a random character from a Tarantino movie. Under these circumstances, any
discussion of «plot» is humiliating. If a game like this introduces the story
of the legendary aviator Anton Fokker as a plot device, you may be sure that
99% of the reasons is the man’s name
— and, sure enough, eventually we learn that he was allegedly abused by his
mother, just to conclude that (quote) "she was one mean mother
Fokker". What else did the game need Fokker for? I honestly do not
remember. Most of the actual subplots concerning individual ladies are on a
whole new order of ridiculous compared to previous Larry games — there is one, for instance, where you are made to
induce a heart attack in a rich old geezer, mistaking him for his sexy wife
with the lights out. There is another where you are supposed to locate a
suitcase of clothes for a lady writer who has secluded herself, clad in
nothing but her laptop, near the «Clothing Optional» pool and told the cabin
boy to hide all her clothes until the end of the cruise. There is another one
where... anyway, never mind. These are enough to show precisely how far your
fantasy can take you if you have to stick to the same formula over and over
again. Ultimately, this is Leisure Suit
Larry Gone Rococo — a mix of creative genius and creative despair. It was probably just a matter of time
anyway before the Larry franchise would officially go nuts, but few could
have predicted the degree of nuttiness. If there is any actual enjoyability
to be had from the game, it certainly does not come from what you have to actively achieve or passively perceive while
playing it, but only from how you
do it. Many of Sierra’s products over the years have turned out to be decent
stories, but rotten games — Larry 7
reverses the trend by being one of the most awful (non‑)stories to be
ever told by Sierra, yet a pretty challenging and involving game at that. |
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When it comes to actual challenges, Larry 7 is not particularly difficult,
but it is certainly different from the typical Sierra game of the time, and
this is where we really have to commend Al for his innovative, if most
certainly doomed, design. Typically, Sierra games from that time were geared
toward strict minimalism of action — beginning with King’s Quest VII, you could only point and click your cursor at
hotspots on the screen without being able to choose from several options.
Even Al’s own Torin’s Passage had
to follow that model, and I can only guess that he hated it as much as I do,
because for Larry 7 he successfully
negotiated a complete redesign of the interface, which not only brought back
the strategy of multiple options, but even re-introduced... (drumroll)... THE TEXT PARSER! Before you go all old-school whoo-hoo
on this (because you know you want to, right?), let me prepare you for the
inevitable disappointment: the parser as such is almost completely optional —
in fact, you can get through the entire game without using it at all, except
for one single «training» instance at the very beginning of the game in which
a certain command is not available until you type it in. It does, however,
bring on the illusion of lots and lots of extra freedom (I will return to
this in more details in the «Interface» section), and in any case, having to
use actual verbs to choose from
while thinking about what to do or not to do with a particular object is a
huge step forward from the way too literally understood point-and-click
strategy of Sierra’s 1993-1996 games. (Formally, it is a step backward, but there is nothing like a
good swig of regress to cure the inevitable stupidity of progress, every once
in a while). At your discretion, it may be made into
an even huger step: apparently, there is a special game mode which can be
unlocked, in typical Al Lowe fashion, by typing the option GET_HARD into a
special text file in the game folder; this removes the small list of
recommended verbs next to objects and dialog options next to NPCs which
usually crop up when clicking on them, and really reverts you to the good old days of the parser, when you
had to imagine and invent instead of choose from pre-available options. But
if I am correct, this option was not even available as public knowledge at
the time of the game’s release, though I have no idea why (what is wrong with
offering every player the choice between a Hard Mode and an Easy Mode from
the start?) Anyway, I’ve always played the game in
its standard mode as a result, which is hardly any easier or more difficult
than playing Larry 6. The best
puzzles in the game are the ones that require you to find different ways for
cheating your way out of the contests. Like everything else in the game,
these ways are absurd, yet they definitely follow the game’s own twisted
logic, and if you do a good job of looking at everything (such as, for
instance, not slacking your way out of browsing through every available book
in the library), they come with helpful hints which can point you in the right
direction at the right time. Some of the challenges are fully independent and
can be completed at any time (such as winning the craps game with shaved
dice); others depend on your interactions with the many ladies of PMS Bouncy,
meaning that getting stuck in any particular location is usually not due to
your stupidity, but simply because you have not explored one of the other
paths beforehand — the game actively discourages you from spending too much
time in one place. As in the previous two Larry games, it
is impossible to get deadlocked — you can very easily miss a lot of points by
failing to do some minor optional task or doing things in the wrong order,
but there is no way to corner yourself into an unwinnable state. This is
good; what is worse is that, like in Larry
5, you can no longer die in any of those hilarious Sierra ways — Larry 6 seemed to bring them all back,
but for some reason, Al put the lid on the idea for Larry 7 again. Maybe the artists went on strike when asked to
design some nice fresh blood-and-guts animations for their cartoonish Larry
or something, I don’t know; in any case, it was hardly a matter of ratings,
because, while there is almost no violence in the game, it does set some new
records for nudity and sexual content in the Larry universe. Speaking of sexual content, one extra
bit of entertainment is a mini-game called «Where’s Dildo?» (a fairly obvious
parody on «Where’s Waldo?»), where you have to spot 30+ of these objects
(which actually look quite a bit like Waldo) while walking around the various
locations on the ship, ranging from easily obvious to quite heavily
camouflaged. It’s excruciatingly stupid, but for some reason I see something
endearing in the gesture. Another thing that can and will be missed unless
you consult walkthroughs are Easter Eggs — highly specific and practically
unguessable actions (such as "milk the beaver") which you have to
perform in order to get access to juicy lewd bits of nudity during some of
the saucier scenes. (The very last Easter Egg, showing Larry getting it on
with Captain Thygh for just a single second, can only be discovered if you
score all 1000 points, find all the Dildos, and get all the other Easter Eggs — a tough achievement even if
you sit through the entire game with a walkthrough in your hand; for
instance, you will have to endure all of Billy Clinton’s jokes, which take up
approximately 30 minutes!). One really nicely designed distraction
from regular puzzles is a game of Strip Liar’s Dice with one of Larry’s
potential non-conquests — I would have probably made it skippable for those
who think that mini-games are a waste of their time, but on the positive
side, this is the only implementation of Liar’s Dice in an adventure game
known to me, and thus, a refreshing change from all the countless games of
regular dice, poker, and blackjack you had to sit through in the other Larry
(and other Sierra) titles. The entire sequence is cool — the game shows you
no mercy, your conniving opponent is as gorgeous as she is sharp-tongued, and
the stripping process is handled with surprising taste (well, as much of it
as Al Lowe can handle) and hilarity. |
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I think that, by and large, I have
already covered this subject in the «Plot» section, given the general lack of
plot in the game as such, or, at least, its absolute irrelevance next to the
overall spirit of the game. On the whole, the atmosphere of the game was
probably supposed to match that of its predecessor — poking fun at the
nonsensically extravagant life of the rich and famous, as seen from the
perspective of a half-sarcastic, half-envious loser from a different world.
In reality, Larry 7 transcends
satire and eventually turns into a surrealist meta-celebration of each and
every depraved and twisted fantasy that a bored stiff decadent mind is
capable of coming up with. I do not disagree in the slightest that
this is a niche that must be
filled, one way or the other: some of the more outrageous porn movies from
the Golden Age probably did that, though it must be stressed that, despite
there actually being more openly sexual content this time than ever before, Larry 7 is still a game about
decadence in general, rather than pornography as such. Aboard the PMS Bounty,
sexual imagery is everywhere, but so is gaudy, tasteless, Trump-style
opulence in general, and taking regular swings at all the tacky interiors
would be fair game. Unfortunately, when it comes to dialogue, Al is, on the
whole, far more interested in making dirty jokes. Easily offended people will
be easily offended at the fact that he decorates the entrance to the ship’s
casino with several Hawaiian-style head carvings (wearing shades) bearing the
names Han-Ja-Ub ("the tiki god of war") and Bloh-Ja-Ub ("the
tiki god of love"); the other side is respectively decorated with
Sno-Ja-Ub and Reem-Ja-Ub ("those lovable, crazy, happy-go-lucky
alcoholic tiki brothers"). I am not offended, but I would still have
preferred some snarky commentary on what the hell are examples of traditional
Hawaiian art supposed to be doing in such a location in the first place. Still, the attraction of Larry 7 is in just how much random
goofy stuff Al has plastered all over the place, and it is safe to say that
most of your game playing time will be devoted not to solving specific
challenges, but to simply poking around, trying to uncover as many details as
possible. This approach had already been applied in Larry 6, but the motto of Larry
7 is "everything bigger than everything else": room after room
after room is filled with ships-in-a-bottle, stuffed beavers, outrageous
culinary products, and God knows what else. In the previous games, with very
few exceptions, Larry’s girls were always at the forefront of attention;
here, it gets so stuffy that sometimes you almost can’t see them behind all
the crazy random paraphernalia. Silly and stupid as it all may be, Larry 7 is still, in its own perverse
way, a monument to the potential of human imagination, wherever that strange
thing may go. All it lacks is a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle,
but this is not to say it has not been influenced by the world of Guybrush
Threepwood — at times, Love For Sail!
feels like what The Curse Of Monkey
Island would have been, if designed and written by the likes of Larry
Flynt. Finally, it must be acknowledged that Larry 7 is redeemable of any sins by featuring the single funniest character in an Al Lowe game — and perhaps in the entire Sierra universe — in the face of Peggy, the ship’s "surly foul-mouthed deckhand", "heavily affected by a childhood spent watching too many pirate movies". Clearly, much of what comes out of that mouth would not have been as funny without the magnificent voicing by Mary Kay Bergman (an extremely talented voice actress who tragically took her own life three years later), but in between Al’s dialogue and Mary Kay bringing it to life, Peggy becomes one of those «lost-in-videogame» characters who would be world famous if discovered in a comedic movie or maybe even in a comic book, but instead has to drag out this closet existence in a forgotten video game. ("I can see why they call you Peggy, Peggy" – "Oh can you, lameass? It’s because my fucking mother named me Margaret, you stupid cocksucker!") She probably holds the Quentin Tarantino Record of having the absolute highest quotient of swear words uttered by a female character in a videogame, but, of course, it is not the quantity that matters, but the creative emploi of the lexemes in question. All in all, she alone is responsible for at least 50% of the atmosphere in this game — the rest is all about golden pissing boy statues and cleavage. |
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Technical features |
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Despite full-motion video still being
the dominant trend in 1996 (for Sierra, at least), it was fairly obvious that
a Larry game could not be filmed
(unless they really wanted to turn
it into an actual porn game), and so Al turned to the second dominating trend
— cartoon graphics, first introduced by Sierra in Disney fashion with King’s Quest VII. Al had only just
used that technique with Torin’s
Passage, his own tribute to the fairy tale fantasy genre, and Love For Sail! continues in the same
vein, though the artists are completely different (well, it would have been
strange for the exact same graphic artists to be working on a family-friendly
fairy tale and an adult-oriented
game with pinup girls all over the place). The Disney stylistics continues to rule
supreme, but this, of course, is a weird, lewd version of Disney, and while I
think that it suits the «classic» Larry
spirit just as poorly as everything else about the game, it certainly matches
the gaudy spirit of Love For Sail!
in particular. The interiors are more colorful than ever, positively dazzling
with shades of the entire rainbow palette, and hyperbolic grotesqueries are
all over the place, as is sexual subtext (lewd shapes emerge on every corner,
from grossly trimmed topiaries to silhouettes formed inside lava lamps).
Ladies, are of course, depicted in ways to emphasize their, uh, lady parts,
with additional emphasis on their sociological attributes — thus, the
country-western Juggs couple are depicted with huge heads of permed hair; the
Film Noir dame Annette is given a fierce stare and a huge black hat to cover
her face; and the Prude Librarian wears a hair bun larger than head. Larry himself has not changed much
since the last game, though the increased quality of textures and cartoon
animation help him, as well as the many NPCs throughout, look more
(cartoonishly) realistic — which, of course, does not mean that he is in any
way closer to the classic image of the old days, which are gone forever
anyway. At least there are no technical complaints about any of the
animations — and we have to be grateful that Al shipped the game in time to
avoid the onset of the early 3D era, which (as the only surviving snippet of Larry 8 shows very well) would have
made the visuals absolutely dreadful. There are a few pre-rendered video
sequences in the game, included as separate video files and activated at
predetermined moments, such as the classic «psychedelic» scene in which poor
Larry has visions of hot dogs running away from mustard bottles, Peggy riding
her broomstick, and dancing condoms after being drugged by the con artist
«Dewmi More» (yes, in case I did not mention this earlier, many of the dames
in the game are named after Hollywood prototypes — there is also «Drew
Baringmore» and «Jamie Lee Coitus», har har har). Unfortunately, the video
quality is predictably low, just as it was in similar cutscenes in King’s Quest VII, and although, at the
time, this technical solution was probably meant to prevent your computer
from overheating, this results in a nasty jolt of anti-immersion whenever you
briefly transition from regular gameplay into the video-playing mode (though
the videos themselves are usually quite short). |
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The music of Larry 7 generally follows the classic pattern — relatively
low-key, unintrusive jazzy themes accompany you almost everywhere you wish to
go, only occasionally giving way to character-suited themes; thus, the Prude
Librarian is, of course, accompanied by harpsichord sounds from the 16th
century (though, funny enough, also arranged for elevator muzak purposes),
later to be replaced by Vegas strip lounge music after her miraculous
«transformation». The intimidating image of Peggy the Pirate Lady is aptly
reflected in a massive and yawny tuba waltz theme, and good old Nashville
rears its pretty head every time the Juggs show up (there is even a brief
vocal snippet of one of their songs that can be activated any time you want). The really nice news is that the music
is actually music, not a pure MIDI
soundtrack but actual musical themes recorded by real musicians (including Al
Lowe in person, with his soprano sax) at Chick Corea’s Mad Hatter studios, as
claimed in the credits. This would probably have not been implemented with
anybody other than Al, whose long-time hobby as a jazz musician meant that he
had plenty of friends in professional circles and could probably arrange for
something like this without a serious strain on Sierra’s budget. The results
are not smashing, because the musical themes of Larry were never meant to go beyond some lightweight good-time
entertainment, but there is definitely a big difference if you play the MIDI
soundtrack of Larry 6 and the live
soundtrack of Larry 7 back to back
— the latter helps bring even more life and color to the game. Al even went as far as to license a few
classic bits of music, first time ever in a Larry game (if not in any Sierra game as such) — Larry’s
psychedelic visions unfurl to the sounds of Iron Butterfly’s
‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’, his extremely brief showing up at the Fashion Show is
accompanied by Chic’s ‘Le Freak’, and his final triumph over Captain Thygh is
marked with Kool & The Gang’s ‘Celebrate’ — the latter two selections, of
course, intended to remind us of the absurdity of Leisure Suit Larry’s
Seventies’ image in the mid-Nineties (little did poor Al know of how huge a
comeback disco would make in the 21st century — today, the sight of anybody
grooving to these songs would barely raise an eyelid compared to how
embarrassing the gesture would have looked back in 1996). Again, these are
just minor stylistic touches, but they do point the way to making a more and
more cinematic experience of the whole thing. Then, of course, there is the voice
cast. Many of the actors from Larry 6
have managed to reprise their roles, chief among them Jan Rabson as Larry
himself, of course, and next to him, the inimitably suave Neil Ross as
Narrator — everything good (and
bad) I might have said about them in the Larry
6 review applies here as well. Sheryl Bernstein, who had already voiced
several of Larry’s ladies in 6,
returns to seduce you as Casino Con Artist «Dewmi Moore» and intimidate you
as the gruff-but-oversexed Captain Thygh. The already mentioned Mary Kay
Bergman, in addition to her unforgettable turn as Peggy, voices no fewer than
three other girls, giving each one her own personality; and then there’s
Jennifer Darling, a 50-year old veteran of stage, screen, and
behind-the-screen voicing (who, ironically, had taken part in quite a few
episodes of Where’s Waldo?,
parodied in this game with Where’s
Dildo?), to represent both the old personality of the Repressed Prude
Librarian and the freshly changed personality of the Liberated Sex-Starved
Librarian. All of them do great jobs, and if you think they might be
overacting it at times — well, the whole game is about overacting (actually,
one might argue that all voice
acting in all video games is always
about overacting, since your voice is the only thing available to you in such
situations, but that’s a matter of a separate discussion). From a defiantly modern «down with
racial stereotypes!» point of view, one might, of course, whistle down and
condemn the mock-Chinese accent of Scott Bullock as Wang, or the mock-French
accent of Michael Gough as Jacques, the snotty French croupier, let alone the
suspiciously unidentified (but probably Mid-Eastern, judging by the fez)
cabin boy Xqwzts, also voiced by Gough. But as I have already pointed out
before, Love For Sail! is a
meta-parody, nothing about which is to be taken seriously in the least — and
besides, all of these are minor characters with whom you shall only interact
once or twice throughout the game... and why, in fact, would you want to
interact with them any longer, if this game is all about having Larry hit on
a variety of hot women, rather than chat on matters of life and death with
decidedly un-hot men?.. |
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Interface As I already mentioned, Larry 7 is one of the few Sierra games
from this period to have earned the right to its own, completely autonomous
and unique, interface — this was actually the first thing that impressed me
about the game, and one of the main reasons (along with Mary Kay Bergman) why
I still preserve a fond feeling for it. First and foremost, after a long
series of games that seemed to take their cue from classic LucasArts, Al has
restored Sierra’s full screen — now your entire monitor is occupied by the
picture, while menu options crop up only at the click of the mouse. Second,
while the cursor (faithfully shaped as a condom) always retains the same
shape, clicking it on an object brings up a number of verbs potentially
associated with it, from which you can select the option you want to try out
— this, in a way, makes more sense than having a fixed number of options for
everything, so that, for instance, a food item will offer you to «Smell» or
«Lick» it, while a door will offer you to «Open» or «Close» it. Third and most important, there’s the
parser. For everything out there, you have the option to type in your own
verb — and while you will soon discover that the function of the parser is
more ornamental than anything, it is nice to have it all the same, especially
for somebody who, like me, thinks that the loss of the text parser was the
worst thing to have happened to Sierra adventure games. I even remember being
so naïve at the time as to think that this could be the beginning of a
beautiful renaissance... and who knows, maybe it would, had Al Lowe not been
given the sack along with all the other Sierra veterans a couple years later.
As it is, the only thing that the parser really adds to the game is the
option to increase the number of topics on which you can converse with the
other NPCs — for instance, when meeting Peggy, there is a set of about 10
pre-determined topics, but you may type in extra stuff, such as «Captain
Thygh» or «Peter the Purser», and get meaningful and / or hilarious answers,
though they are completely unnecessary to beat the game as such. The game menu is hidden away at the top
of the screen and can be easily brought out by hovering over the top left
corner; there are the usual Al Lowe tricks, such as the Boss Key, the Filth
Level (never tried decreasing it and neither should you), and a lengthy
«About the Game» section which you absolutely have to click because (spoiler?
ah, fuck it!) it gives you extra points and the 32nd Dildo to find. Nice,
informative, inobtrusive. One novelty feature of the game is that
the original package came with a sheet of scratch-and-sniff paper, called the
CyberSniff 2000 — at certain points when you enter a «smelly» area or inspect
a smelly object in your inventory window, a CyberSniff 2000 sign is
activated, prompting you to interact with your paper. This is something that,
alas, can no longer be experienced due to the game no longer being in print
as a physical copy, and I suppose that those who still have the original box
have long since worn out the smells (I played a pirated version back in the
day, so obviously I was deprived of that sweet-smelling joy). Of course, had
Al Lowe been a little bolder, the box should have probably included a batch
of sex toys instead, but given how little action there is actually in the
game, it would be tough to think of the proper instructions to synchronize...
okay, never mind, we’re going someplace we’re not really supposed to. One last thing that makes the game very
comfortable to play is the inclusion of a map option which allows you
insta-travel to any location on the ship at any time — goodbye, wasted
minutes and hours of backtracking that were always a pain in the ass not just
for Larry games, but for Sierra in
general (ironically, the only Sierra game which allowed you to insta-travel
just about anywhere was King’s Quest
III back in 1986). On the down side, this means that Larry himself very
rarely has to walk anywhere, other than taking two or three steps back and
forth on a particular screen — which brings Larry 7 closer to the style of TellTale adventure games and their
claustrophobic world format. Then again, you spend the entire game on a
friggin’ ocean liner, so I guess it’s supposed to be a bit claustrophobic,
after all. In any case, Al Lowe’s solution of the
gaming interface problem gets an indisputable A+ from me — other than running
into occasional trouble with the condom-cursor while searching for the
necessary hotspot on the screen, there was absolutely nothing about the game
that looked like even remotely frustrating; in terms of design and structure,
this just might be the single best game in Sierra’s entire history. If only it
lived up to the design in terms of content — if, say, this were Larry 2 and not Larry 7 — paradise would not be far off. |
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As you have probably noticed already, I spent most of the first half
of the review panning the game and most of the second half praising it. This
came out quite naturally and, I think, well-deservedly, because Love For Sail! is a classic example of
triumph of form over substance: for each new excellent idea on how to make
the experience more eye-pleasing, more ear-pleasing, and overall more
comfortable for the player, there is a glaring lack of a new excellent idea on how to evolve and expand the
classic Leisure Suit Larry experience. You do get better graphics — so the
babes look more curvaceous than ever before; better sound, so the music and voices sound more natural
than ever before; and a great interface, so you don’t get to hurl as many
curse words at the screen as you did before. But do you get an altogether new
experience? Nope. The only thing that is new about it is that the jokes get
cruder and the action gets saucier, while the basic plot formula remains
exactly the same as it was in the previous game — the laziest ever round of
evolution in Larry history. And, just in case, let me remind you that this did not always used to
be the case. None of the games from the original classic trilogy repeated
themselves so obviously and so completely — Larry 2 gave us a genuine «adventure» game, while Larry 3 made things different by
introducing the female perspective of Passionate Patti. Even Larry 5, awful as it turned out, still
tried to take us into a sort of different direction by introducing a
sociopolitical aspect. At least Larry 6
could be justified for offering us a «reboot» of the entire franchise,
essentially returning to the roots of the first game but vastly improving on
each of its technical aspects. But Larry
7 is no longer a «reboot»: instead, it comes across as a lapse into
self-repetition, following the accursed give-the-people-what-they-want
principle. In order to deflect that impression, the game tries to make its
situations more complex and twisted, giving its «bimbo babes» more
personality-defining backstory and making its sexy challenges even more
ridiculous and grotesque than ever before — yet this is precisely the area in
which it fails, because the universe of Larry cannot really be complexified
beyond a certain threshold (look what happened to Larry 5 when it decided to take an almost serious stance against
the conservative policies of the time). All in all, I can only repeat that if you only want to try out one Larry game to see what the hoopla was
all about, do not make the common mistake of grabbing Larry 7 as the most technically polished title of them all (which
it certainly is) — save your curiosity for the original trilogy, which is so
much more representative of the, er, depth
of Al Lowe’s original vision. However, if you are captivated and want more
than just a taste, then there is no reason to bypass Larry 7 — after all, there really is a huge lot of things it does
well, from wonderful voice acting to the unexpected fun of playing Liar’s
Dice. If only the game had offered us a more conclusive finale, rather than
briefly and unsatisfyingly setting up the scene for Larry 8 (which was to be called either Lust In Space, or Leisure
Suit Larry Explores Uranus, MY GOD!!..), I might have called it a
decent-enough swan song for the franchise. Yet I am still glad that we never got the chance to see Larry Laffer in
abominable 3D (we did get to see Larry’s «nephew», Larry Lovage, in 2004’s Magna Cum Laude, but that was really a
completely different game with a completely different spirit that nobody ever
needs to play), and, honestly, I am not at all sure that Al Lowe would have
been able to once again go beyond that formula and properly steer Larry
Laffer into the 21st century; much like James Bond, this guy is a character
much better capable of being endearing from behind the smokescreen of time than
when standing next to you in this day and age. So just get behind the
smokescreen already. |
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