Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail!

"REVOLTING RUBBISH!!! Get yer REVOLTING RUBBISH he-e-e-re!!! [waves LSL7 cd]"

Oh dear lord. Contrasted against the hopeful LSL6, this game takes a swan dive in the quality department--the sort of swan that ''talked to'' Leda, mind. What is there to say? This game looks like a Looney Tunes cartoon with the physical impossibilities in animation, and it will scare you off risque jokes and possibly even Droopy re-runs(oh, to see Droopy beat up LSL and shake his head) for a few days. There's shameful ''Ribald and Licentious, yet Possessing a Consciousness of Its Own'' (forced self-referentiality, AKA art ''doing'' itself, as its spine snaps from the contortions and it slowly folds into self-absorption,) forced sexual innuendo, yutzed-up puzzles, overdoing the whole ''humiliate Larry'' angle, and even Larry's leisure suit is more annoying. But no! They don't stop there. Some grand goombah must have said, ''Hey! I gotta great idea! Let's diversify into GENERAL VULGARITY! I'm talking body functions! Profanity! Anyone who doesn't go along with it is Stuffy and Repressed! I mean, we're providing a More Universal Message here! Heck, there'll be enough people to say 'well, LSL certainly pushes the envelope,' and he'll say it bold enough that it can get through marketing. Then we'll sell to our Base Customers. Maybe we can sucker the ones who liked the original and want to believe that we're concentrating as much on the story as we are on technology. And if it's too risque then we can point out there's no way to die in the story and no outright pornography. And if anything flops, if there's too much originality people never would have thought of or even wanted to, remember that the game is SATIRIZING everything it SEEMS to portray because it's SUBTLE.'' (cue general back-slapping, overdone laughter, people trying to convince their neighbor that I agree more than you do with this guy because I'm open-minded.)

The playing interface is probably the highlight of the game; although it can be torture to walk between rooms, you can click to bring up a map and click on the appropriate area, providing you can visit there. This sort of hyperspace cuts out having to put up with Larry's dorky walking(which you can thankfully speed up) and is appreciated overall. There's a nice little GUI interface that can pop up necessary menus, just like a standard Windows application. However, actually running through the game is another matter; there are many examples of things you need to examine or hear in order to get points that are just painful, and the new dialog facilitates your efforts to get in and out quickly, so the interface comes off like someone who nicks you with a papercut but has a band-aid handy. In the meantime, there is too much dialog when you do something irrelevant, and even with handy pop-up captioning, it is not fun.

The game itself starts at the end of LSL6. Oh look, Larry gets dumped again. It's not just how he gets dumped, it's that 1)it was really stupid and un-funny how he picked up Shamara at the end of LSL6 as no-one could believe a woman would say that, and 2) they seem to expect you're surprised. Larry's handcuffed to the bed(this device should be used only once a game, but LSL7 overdoes it) and Shamara lights a cigarette and leaves it with him as a gift. The bed starts burning, and Larry needs to unlock the handcuffs. It's fairly easy(much easier than making sense out of the resulting scene) to jump out of the penthouse, replete with an unnecessary fat lady singing and larry landing on a cactus with a, err, branch in his mouth(which is disgustingly suggestive and not funny,) and you find out you've won tickets to a cruise. The first shot is promising; you see not one but FOUR women fully but attractively dressed, and one even has a long skirt(Annette Boning, who is excused this indiscretion as she turns out to be a Femme Fatale, outrageous hat and all, wheeling her aged hubby in. Later on there's even a welcome pseudo-prude wearing--gasp--GLASSES with that unrevealing outfit!) Your job will be to gain designated queen-bee uber-babe Captain Thygh's approval(well, I liked the sailor uniform, I admit) but first there's the standard getting mostly rejected by a string of allegedly less attractive women first.

Not that the variety is poor; most of them have names that are plays on famous people's names. You can guess what they did to the Judds, and ''Drew Baringmore'' and Jaime Lee Curtis's(Joisey accent) are amusing, but Dewmi Moore makes me cringe--not closing my eyes fully in the process, I admit. Victorian Principles undergoes a welcome transformation from a prude who doesn't know what she's got(her monitor later displays LSL6, the only self-referential joke I considered laughing at) but this game needs to do more than incite a few giggles for some funny pictures and names. And this is where it gets tiresome.

''Mommy! Do we -have- to include a plot?''

''Yes, junior, and make it a decent one.'' Well, if it's scrambled enough, enough folks may pass it off as ''creative, but not my cup of tea. Must be open-minded and all.'' On the way, Larry must cheat his way into scoring high on various competitions(cooking, best dressed, gambling, love-making, horseshoes, and bowling) although there are predictable jabs at Larry if you try in the meantime, and of course you always have to stick your scorecard somewhere suggestive to participate. Mostly orifices, but one is behind a zipper. Meanwhile, as a break from sexual jokes and scenes, you have bad humor aplenty. Larry has six different prank calls he can make to the Prissy Purser(how Avant-Garde-Like. He makes for two gay men in LSL in a row, and there's a good deal more fun made of them than the Beefy Heterosexual,) and there's a Bill Clinton stand-up routine that frequently trashes Hillary Clinton, but listening to it gets you points--this is the sort of unoriginal unrealism that makes people like me who claim save up their energy for the big rants, well, take action. Although the game can feature as many shallow women as you like, dragging someone who is pro-women's rights in as a punch line is terribly uncool. Before that, I was going to let the Gore jokes slide. At some point, the game can't use ''Geez, it's just an unrealistic joke'' any more. Then, as a break from the attractive women you see there is an ugly woman who frequently uses different tools screwed to her peg leg to perform different chores; this is ruined when you talk to her, and she curses twice per sentence. Even on the Extra Filth level of raunchiness, there is no need to overdo it. So they can't even get the concept of contrast right, and their attempts at subtlety are even worse. Larry and Drew at one point discuss ''Fokker.'' Fokking A.

General acts of vandalism, bribery, stealing and self-humiliation(deliberate or no--see the cactus part above) are the order of the day to get through the game, which is further poisoned when it tries its hand at ironic say-this-improbable-situation-sucks-doesn't-it self-humiliation designed to make you say ''Oh, how clever.'' They're usually quite easy to figure out, as the condom that runs across the screen gets longer when it might be worth clicking somewhere, and once an object is identified there's only so much you can do with it. Having just played a Beavis and Butt-Head game, which contains the first two acts in my sentence, I can fall back on the phrase ''they maintain their innocence'' which Larry doesn't. He's constantly scheming, he talks too darned much, and the self-humiliation(absent in B&B) doesn't feel like just desserts, it feels like meanness(''Whatsa matter? You don't want to make fun of the dork? C'mon!'') You want to grab the computer and shut it up, and even being able to click the screen after you've read the subtitles doesn't cut out the first bit. Larry's catch phrases are too ponderous, and you don't see pathos or even bathos. He comes across as a total loser and then needs to figure out something like dice shaving or strategy for Strip Liar's Dice with Dewmi Moore--okay, it was nicer to look at than the similar game in Legacy of the Ancients, but you can't repeatedly and alternately humiliate a character before making him smart. Then there's the whole ''overdoing it more and more each time--'' Larry pays a very high price indeed to get in bed with Captain Thygh. While he had to track down three traditional gifts for Dawn, half a billion dollars in stock for a woman is too much. It's okay to have shallow women, but the joke is too obvious here. There's nothing funny about a gag depicting paying that much for sex. Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire was only funny because it was in earnest.

''When they stink it up, they don't fart around.''

Body functions are also in effect; although they leave it to you to supply the puking, they cover all the standard ones. You're stuck with a dark room in the cabin hold(more unrealistic humiliation) and there's a leaky toilet. Woo-oo. Then there's a Bean Dip joke you'll never see coming(Helpful Verbal Detail from Larry: ''I sure do like Bean Dip.'' In the informal updated Gustave-Who Dictionary of Received Ideas, that stuff's for dorks--get the joke?) It's all more heavy-handed than ''Hey dork! You've got toilet paper on your shoe!'' There are other goodies, like Larry mentioning he likes disco or when he brings leisure suits back into fashion for the best dressed competition or when you find a python that's devoured a pig in the kitchen; you need to look at it to get maximum points, after which Larry wonders what it's there for. Annoying narrator: ''It's my game, I'll do what I want.''

Speaking of which, another sacrosanct LSL joke is ruined. ''What's your sign?''/''Octagonal--as in STOP!'' is regurgitated unnecessarily. NOOOO! Then, for Pleasant Diversions, there's also a side game, not quite ''Where's Waldo?'' that exhorts you to find and click on thirty-two hot-dog looking objects and doesn't stop encouraging you to find more once you get to that magic thirty-two. Oh look, Achieve Beyond Your Self-Defined Limits.

As for graphics, specific details of the Looney Tuned display show regressions from LSL6. Larry looked normal if a bit short in LSL6 but here his nose is too big, bringing back shades of the big-headed Larry of LSL5. I've mentioned the improbable graphics that only previously reared their head in the risque scenes that were alleged rewards for solving puzzles, but when you open a locker and the row of lockers opens like a garage door, squashing Larry's head, or when Larry gets wrapped up in a sail that acts like a window blind, it's a bit too much. And although there is usually enough detail you don't sense that you enjoy it, and it's an insult to poor Wil E. Coyote who makes off worse than Larry-he NEVER gets the Roadrunner. Everything is made into sexual innuendo, even a chicken at the piano--''Jeffrey likes to let his [] entertain the crowd.'' Yes, okay, the easter eggs brought a brief smile to my face, but I refuse to accept that the game is a commentary on sex and how You Folks Look For it, but the Pleasure is Over So Quickly. It's a fault with the game, not myself.

The sound is also annoying; there is a constant voice-over narrator that sounds like he's from a commercial(oh wait, he's MAKING FUN of the commercial.) Larry's still whiny, and you've got Peg and the cabin boy and the gay man(Maybe an impromptu ''B-U-M-F, this game's a major chunk of B-U-M-F'' sung to the tune of a popular gay ballad would be an appropriate Ironic Easter Egg.) All of the voices are pressing to be funny, and none are. Fortunately, Johnson the bartender is amusingly gruff and the women have different accents. I have to admit I particularly like Annette; you hear sax music when she talks, and it's very kitschy. It adds dimension to her over-breathy voice(a few too many LSL women like that,) but the variety with the Juggs(Southern accent) generally makes the sound a more realistic use of technology than the graphics. Not that the dialog lives up to it.

''Stop! In the name of taste! Before I break this disc!''

Yessir, this is a real stinkbomb(I suppose Mr. Cranky, if he switched from reviewing movies, would prefer the a-bomb) of a game. And it literally stunk; I'm not sure if marketing did their research here, but I seem to remember the barely palatable Leather Goddesses of Phobos also had a scratch and sniff square, although Better Technology helped LSL7's last a bit longer. Thankfully if you just want to make sure you're not prejudiced the puzzles are pretty lame so it shouldn't take long to get through things. LSL7 managed to violate a whole new sense(smell) but thankfully LSL8(Lust in Space) never got around to the ''feel'' bit. Yet at times it almost seemed to have redeeming qualities; a woman actually wore something not 100% revealing and I liked the femme fatale bit, and they at least tried to throw another non-sexy woman in there. There's something about crossing too close to the Looney Toon canon, though, and combined with how starting this game caused my computer to freeze so badly that the on-off button failed and I had to flip the power switch, that darn tootin' well pushed me over the edge and made me slip LSL7 the only single-digit number that might look, well, suggestive. I'll save the two fingers out of ten for some other game. They're on different hands, if you hadn't guessed.

Oh dear, look there, three sentences back. I tried to make sex and body noise funnies and gosh, I'm getting self-referential too. I remember thinking one way this game would be violently worse is if it were contagious and...(shudder) well, if it is, I'll even go watch a Momma's Family marathon to flush it out of my system if I have to.

</rant>

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 11/02/01, Updated 11/02/01