Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail!

Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail! is a video game, part of the Leisure Suit Larry series. It was the last Leisure Suit Larry game written by series creator Al Lowe, and the last (to date) to feature original protagonist Larry Laffer as the main character.

Despite being known as Leisure Suit Larry 7 during its development, Love for Sail! was actually the sixth installment in the Leisure Suit Larry series due to the (apparently intentional) nonexistence of a fourth game.

After many of the Leisure Suit Larry games had gained a reputation for not actually featuring all that much raunchy content when analysed, Love for Sail! included some much more risqué elements compared to previous installments. It also featured more fleshed-out, cartoon style graphics than its predecessors, as well as full voice acting.

This was the first Leisure Suit Larry game to receive an ESRB rating (Mature) upon its original release.

Gameplay

Players can also "appear" in the game by placing voice samples of selected dialogue and a digitized photo in a particular directory (the default is Al Lowe). Due to time constraints, the information to do so was not printed in the manual, but was published only some time later in an online announcement.

Love for Sail! also provides a more-literal-than-usual interpretation of Easter eggs: when certain obscure actions are performed, a small icon resembling an Easter egg flashes in a corner of the screen. This usually indicates that a "seduction" scene can now be played featuring nudity that is normally obscured.

The game also shipped with a "CyberSniff 2000", a sheet of numbered scratch-and-sniff paper, corresponding to a number displayed on the screen at a certain location, so that the player can get a scent of what the area the player character is in smells like.

Plot

Love for Sail! was the first Larry game since the third to pick up immediately where its predecessor left off; typically, it features Larry getting dumped by the woman who represented the ultimate goal of Larry 6, Shamara.

The formula was much the same as the previous games: the "twist" was that Larry was a passenger on a cruise ship populated by parodies of famous people. Among the other cruise guests were "Drew Baringmore" (Drew Barrymore), "Dewmi Moore" (Demi Moore), "Victorian Principles" (Victoria Principal), "Jamie Lee Coitus" (Jamie Lee Curtis), "Nailmi" and "Wydoncha Jugg" (Naomi and Wynonna Judd) and "Annette Boning" (Annette Bening). Various other pop icons were parodied in the background, such as the Archie Comics gang playing nude volleyball, various incarnations of James Bond in the ship's casino (itself an homage to Peter Sellers's famous Casino Royale parody), a Sierra staffer dressed as Sailor Moon, and porn icon Ron Jeremy walking around naked. Most of the male supporting cast (Peter the Purser, Johnson the bartender, Dick the guardrobe attendant, Wang the galley server, Bob Bitt the artist) are named after popular euphemisms for the male reproductive organ or are in some way related to it (Bob Bitt, for instance, is named after John Wayne Bobbitt; the character also shares the same first name and bears a passing resemblance to fellow artist Bob Ross).

The plot revolves around Larry's attempt at winning a weekly contest held on the ship by Captain Thygh, a gorgeous blonde. The contest involves a series of other games varying from legitimate sports competitions like bowling to naughtier things like a machine created to test one's sexual prowess. Each passenger is given a score card with a selection of the various competitions to compete in, and the passenger with the highest cumulative score at the end of the week wins. The prize is an additional free week on the cruise spent sharing the Captain's cabin (and, presumably, her bed.)

The player must come up with a variety of ways to cheat in each of Larry's assigned competitions so that he can get the highest score and win the contest. Among Larry's chosen competitions are a cooking contest, a "best dressed" contest, a game of horseshoes, bowling, the sexual prowess contest and others. At times Larry wins these contests not by cheating but only by an unexpected twist of fate triggered by his (often unintentional) actions. For instance, Larry's encounter with fashion designer Jamie Lee Coitus causes his Leisure Suit to become the height of fashion; as such he wins the best dressed competition. Similar to Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work, it is impossible for the game to be placed in an "unwinnable" state by a bad decision.

Development

Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail! was originally announced under the title Leisure Suit Larry 7: Yank-her's Away!.^[1] According to creator Al Lowe, the development team were initially planning to make the game with live action full motion video, "but what we found out was, we're writing cartoons here... if we did straight video, it becomes not only ludicrous, but obscene [laughs]... We were going over the list of gags we had and just said, 'oh no, you couldn't even do this with blue screen!' ... what we came back to was that we liked what we'd done in the past and we want to do that even more."^[1]

Lowe acknowledged that the game was considerably more risqué than previous installments of Leisure Suit Larry but maintained that the focus was on the humor rather than the nudity or sexual content, and that the game would not appeal to those looking for pornography.^[1]

Mobile version

A mobile version titled Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail (minus the exclamation mark of the PC version) was released on June 21, 2007 by Vivendi Games and Mighty Troglodytes, featuring a completely different plot to the original.^[2]

Reception

According to Al Lowe, the game sold over 250,000 copies.^[3]

The game was reviewed by Danny Wallace in the January 1997 edition of PCGamer (UK) magazine and was given a score of 23%. Wallace described the game as "a pointless mountain of toss".

References

External links

• Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail! at MobyGames