Systems > PC > L > Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards > User Review
Sign up for a free user account and you can leave feedback for this review or even submit a game review of your own!
Review by aschultz
May 28, 2009
Larry starts outside a bar, where you can direct his movement with arrows and type in commands to pause him. For instance, you can ORDER DRINK or SAY PASSWORD. If Larry's in the right area, something interesting will happen. But actually, it's when he stumbles into the wrong areas that really interesting things happen. LSL doesn't have many areas, and it cuts down on the usual boundaries or "you can't go that way" by establishing innumerable alleys and dangerous intersections where Larry gets mugged and run over, respectively. He gets beaten to death for not having cab fare and shot for forgetting to pay for a porn mag or cheap wine. It's not just that Larry's deficient, but rather, that other forces who are deficient are able to BS their way into making Larry seem more hopeless than he is, to punish him more than is his due for cluelessness. Even if Larry does get laid, you sense that he won't learn anything from it.
And of course the foreplay is, well, exciting. You can get pointlessly drunk at the bar, utterly ruining your controls, play the theme on the jukebox, and even flush the toilet in the musty bathroom. But eventually you need to get to a secret room behind the bar, with a pimp guarding a prostitute. In a recurring theme in the game, you need to pander to other characters' stupidity and not necessarily their sex urges. You'll meet folks more interested in getting drunk or condescending to you than in sex as you visit the other areas in the game: the convenience store and disco, then the hotel and casino.
Each of the main three areas has a woman, progressively more difficult to romance, and who reveals to Larry more of how shallow his trip is. From the prostitute whose room you leave out the window, falling into a dumpster, to gold-digging Dawn who leads you on, to the final lady in the penthouse, you must pay your dues and figure cheerfully inane puzzles out before Larry gets any. The cut scenes before and after the act are usually more rewarding for the player than the act itself. Larry getting down at a disco, or forgetting to remove his condom and zip his fly, make for some of the game's better humor.
LSL is prone to the other technical faults in so many Sierra AGI games: diagonal movement is awkward, you often need to be on a weird spot to do certain things, the game's four speeds are either too slow or too fast, and you have plenty of irritating random subgames like blackjack, where you just save every time you win. The graphics are vague, but given how so much of the later games focused on Larry's leisure suit, gold medallion, whiny voice and such, this isn't a bad thing. Larry could almost be an everyman bobbing along tensely in all white, waiting to be defiled. And while timing is more critical to sitcoms than computer games, LSL has just enough raunch or cutting comments to make up for the graphics AGI didn't have the resolution for: "Hey dork! Those pointy-toed shoes hurt!" Or, if you sit around and a dog "waters" you, people comment there.
So a lot of this can be passed of as the world being unfair to Larry, a sort of loser sex comedy without the overacting you might find in a movie or sitcom. The computer, quite simply, deadpans extraordinarily well. It strings your guilt along with jokes like customizing your condom, or "Are you sure, Larry?" Then there's the punch line, and you can laugh at things. Even the quiz you need to prove you are over eighteen produces laughs. But it actually sets up the whole theme of seventies decadence and the poor schlep on the outside of it well. Larry knows the words! He knows the moves! But he doesn't have the touch. Yet.
If you wish to play any of the early Sierra AGI games, and you don't mind crudity, LSL is definitely the one to go with. It's clever and almost sympathetic, and after all, eight-plus sequels that rehashed its jokes can't be wrong. In LSL, it's only the characters that try too hard to seem clever and risque. It's worth playing through the pointless deaths, seeing the worldly wise people no happier than Larry, and bearing the chintz of the stereotypical hotspots. Later LSLs sprawled too much with their puzzles and sexual hang-ups they wished to touch and went for the same sort of flash that LSL made fun of so effectively. But that doesn't change the fun of meeting the apple-barrel man, the drunken priest, the bum and the taxi driver on replay. Like they say, the first time is usually the best.
Rating: 8/10
|
|
|
Most recent video game reviews written by aschultz
Dragon Wars (Apple II) [February 06, 2012]
Eternal Dagger (Apple II) [January 21, 2012]
Othello (NES) [January 09, 2012]
Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny (Apple II) [November 15, 2010]
Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (Apple II) [November 14, 2010]
|
You can click the tabs on the above bar to choose whether you wish to read comments from visitors who have posted on Facebook, or from registered site users who have left feedback on the forums. Please leave a comment of your own if you have anything to say!
|
|
|
Follow Us |
Advertise exclusively for 1 month... only $1000!
Recent Forum Discussions
+ holdthephone's Final Fantasy XIII-2 review
+ Game Progress 2/10
+ Alpha Olympics 2012
+ Where's SkyWard Sword's review ? And please bring back the rating feature.
+ JoeTheDestroyer's Tales of Phantasia review
+ JoeTheDestroyer's Area 51 review
+ zippdementia's Mega Jump review
+ [News] Schafer has pitched Psychonauts 2, Minecraft dev says 'let's make it happen'
+ playstation vita, yo.
+ RotW January 29 - February 04 2012
+ Games to be added to the database...
+ The Final Fantasy XIII-2 thread
Staff Game Reviews
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim |
| SoulCalibur V |
| The Simpsons Arcade Game |
| Quarrel |
| Star Ocean: The Last Hope |
| Pushmo |
Site Staff
 |  | ||
 |  | ||
 |  | ||
 |  | ||
 |
Featured Reviews [+]
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Rayman Origins |
| Othello |
| Scarface: The World is Yours |
| The Last Express |
| Golden Axe II |
| Assassin's Creed: Revelations |
Exclusive User Reviews [+]
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Tales of Phantasia |
| Mega Jump |
| White Knight Chronicles |
| Dragon Wars |
| F-Zero GX |
| Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door |
Info |
Help |
Privacy Policy |
Contact |
Advertise
© 1998-2012 HonestGamers
None of the material contained within this site--from reviews, guides, cheats and editorials to message board posts--may be reproduced in any conceivable fashion without permission from the author(s) of said material. This site is not sponsored or endorsed by Nintendo, Sega, Sony, Microsoft, or any other such party. Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards is a registered trademark of its copyright holder. This site makes no claim to Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, its characters, screenshots, artwork, music, or any intellectual property contained within. Opinions expressed on this site do not necessarily represent the opinion of site staff or sponsors.
