This point and click adventure game was published by Sierra On-Line around 1990 and, as an impressionable pre-pubescent male, was one of my first ventures into adulthood. It was a game that me and my best friend were scared of being caught playing by our parents but in hindsight was just a bit of a risqué romp through the life of an aging loser in life and love.
This game picks up some years after the first Leisure Suit Larry and after winning the heart of his true love (Eve) he (Larry Laffer) finds himself booted out by her and thus the frivolity ensues.
You must guide the hapless Larry around a mid Eighties town in middle America to try and find love. One thing I will say about Larry is that he is always really horny and unluckily the curse of Male Pattern Baldness has started to set in.
As I mentioned before, you navigate Larry’s world by pointing and clicking his environment and also you have to type some of the commands into a text bar which, at that age, I found quite annoying as I had all the typing skills of a snake! During the game you have to win the ‘LuckyBucko Lottery Show’, evade the KGB, participate in a dating show, avoid ‘Doctor Nonookee’ and all in the pursuit of true love.
I thoroughly enjoyed
this game and I was hooked from one of the first screens which is probably the most in-genius copy protection in the history of video gaming. I would put the Turtles game one that you had to use a torch to see properly (or maybe I dreamt that) as a close second. To get passed the copy protection you have to refer to Larry’s Little Black Book, that is provided in the box, and match the girl on screen with the phone number in the book. Brilliant!
I found the game quite visually pleasing for the time but maybe not as good as some of it’s competition but what it lacked in graphics it made up with storyline, humor and double entendres. The famous Larry theme is played at the start but apart from that there is not a great deal of music stimulation throughout the game and it can occasionally seem a little lifeless. The length of the game for an accomplished gamer should be about 12-16 hours but as a youngster I thought it was bloody impossible and now I feel it is a bit short albeit longer than its predecessor.
In summary this is a very good example of the genre and the time and I would recommend it to any lover of Simon the Sorceror and the like and I challenge anyone to play this game without a cheeky grin spreading from ear to ear at some of the comic highpoints.
