"How was Larry created from this pile of bat do's?"

Your task: Seduce three women in one night. Good Luck!!!

Out of the almost 1,000,000 Apple IIs in existence in 1981, Sierra On-Line had sold around 200,000. Some claim that it was the first purely ''adult'' game ever made. Sierra nearly had Softporn Adventure boycotted by a few retailers, so they went about enforcing a crude ''rating'' system on it by not allowing people under the age of 18 to purchase said game.

I got my horny little hands on it (by means of going to Goodwill and scanning the nearly-bare software racks) when I was in sixth grade, which was around the time that I was going through a difficult stage in life: Puberty. Of course, this game was the electronic equivalent of pornography in most people's minds, due to the title alone. None of my friends cared if it was just a simple little text-based game, the object was to score with three loose women!! It was, in theory, the game made for us. Oh, how wrong I would turn out to be after I held my first (and last) Softporn Sleepover.....

When I turned on the Macintosh and slipped the sexy-looking floppy disk in the drive, little would I know that it would spell doom for my sanity. My friends sat eagerly behind me, with tissues and vaseline at the ready. Without a care, I quickly bypassed the ''WARNING: NOT INTENDED FOR USE BY PERSONS UNDER THE AGE OF 18'' warning and went into the game.

YOU ARE IN A HALLWAY. TO THE NORTH IS A VASE OF FLOWERS. TO THE WEST IS A DOOR. HALLWAY CONTINUES TO THE EAST.

''Peh,'' I snorted, opting to go down the hallway that I was mysteriously dropped into.

TO THE EAST IS A DESK. BEHIND THE DESK IS A VOLUPTUOUS BLONDE. TO THE WEST IS A DOOR. TO THE NORTH IS A STAIRCASE.

''Ooh!'' One of my friends shouted, ''Talk to the blonde!''

''Get a description!'' suggested another, reaching over to type ''LOOK''.

TO THE EAST IS A DESK. BEHIND THE DESK IS A VOLUPTUOUS BLONDE. TO THE WEST IS A DOOR. TO THE NORTH IS A STAIRCASE.

''Damn!! How am I supposed to get off to this?'' he moaned.

Ever cool in the face of pressure, I typed ''TALK TO BLONDE''.

My response: ''TRY ANOTHER ACTION!!''

I growled. It was a stubborn parser. I had learned what a stubborn parser was when I was playing through Dragon's Forge for the first time. ''TALK TO VOLUPTOUS BLONDE'' was the first thing I typed in.

TRY ANOTHER ACTION!!

''Crap, I misspelled it,'' I said. ''TALK TO VOLUPTUOUS BLONDE'' I corrected to the parser.

THE BLONDE IS LOOKING AWAY. MAYBE YOU CAN DO SOMETHING TO DISTRACT HER.

''The flowers!'' one friend said. I went South twice, grabbing the flowers from the vase. ''Only a fool could miss something as obvious as that!'' he said proudly. I had to agree. The level design sucked so far.

YOU HAVE THE FLOWERS, the parser confirmed.

Approaching the Voluptuous Blonde again, I told the parser to ''GIVE FLOWERS TO BLONDE''.

TRY ANOTHER ACTION!!

''Do I have to type 'voluptuous' every time I do this?'' I asked of the Macintosh. My fingers were already aching, but I pressed on and typed in ''GIVE FLOWERS TO VOLUPTUOUS BLONDE''.

THE BLONDE IS LOOKING AWAY. MAYBE YOU CAN DO SOMETHING TO DISTRACT HER.

''Yeah,'' one of my friends grunted. ''Some loser shoving a flower in her face doesn't catch her eye?''

''And there's no porn yet? Maybe I should go watch Behind the Green Door again and come back when something's actually happening.'' said another, and the rest gleefully followed him into my living room as I was left to struggle with the stubborn parser, now my least favorite thing to deal with in games. Period.

That night, I discovered that you have an inventory of cash, and the only way to get money is to hop in a taxi outside the hotel and go to a casino, so you can gamble and hope to get something out of it. My favorite part in any game would have to be the ''condom'' part from Leisure Suit Larry (the original), and sadly, the designers of Softporn Adventure failed to put in a convenience store. How sad.

Al Lowe, the creator of Larry, cited this game as the ''inspiration'' for his superb line of games (which spawned a horde of sequels, unlike this sorry heap of binary code), and I fail to see the similarities. Sure, you have to score with women to succeed in both games, but in Softporn Adventure, you couldn't go to a Drive-Thru Chapel to get married, order a hooker and get a disease from her, read graffiti on bathroom walls, get run over by cars...

The list goes on, but my patience for SA came to an end, and I buried the disk under a pile of Mario Trivia cards and went into the living room to see some real porn.

Final Score: 1

I was lucky enough to find SA at an abandonware site for the PC, and it was similar enough to the Apple II version for my cousin, better known as Alikian around these parts, had a nice time trying to move around the hotel lobby, and about half an hour had elapsed before he figured out that you could exit the hotel, and he promptly went to try his hand at Blackjack. He went bankrupt immediately. Next time around, he repeatedly tried to get to first base with the Voluptuous Blonde from the lobby, but constantly failed. He had a nice time trying, though, as the game accurately modeled his real-life experiences with women to a mind-boggling extent. Since he had the urge to get turned on by a video game, he fled from the PC and turned on DOA3.

w00tness Meter: 4

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 01/09/02, Updated 05/24/03