The Little Ugly Evil Guy On My Shoulder's Verdict: All the sex scenes are censored! Boo! Hiss! It's not really interactive fiction anyway...go play Leisure Suit Larry 3 instead. That's a real game. With animated sex scenes.
The Little Handsome, Good Guy On My Shoulder's Verdict: This game is offensive and demeaning towards women. It's a graphical piece of trash and doesn't belong on this site.
My Verdict: Ah, nuts! It's not a bad game, actually - quite entertaining and short. The subject matter is shoitenly risque, but not really that risque(compared to some of the later Larrys, at least!!). Is it interactive fiction? Sort of, but I suppose many, many games that are not generally recognized as such could also be considered interactive fiction - even super-graphical games like Myst. I'm just writing up this review here cuz I know this is a game that just ain't too important in the world of IF. I can say whatever I want to say about it, and get this review done in fifteen minutes, too!
The character you play in this game is this fellow named Leisure Suit Larry - hard to believe, but it's true. He's a computer software salesman or somethin', but that's not important. Your goal is help Larry get women. That is, in fact, the sole purpose of this game. If you're a girl, you'll probably hate this program - I mean, how could you like it? The female characters featured are invariably either manipulative or vapid - hardly a flattering portayal of the gender. You'd have to be a jolly, good-natured female indeed to enjoy the game. But, hey, maybe that's exactly what you are! But sexism aside for a moment, to be honest with you the game just isn't that great by any means. It's simple - far simpler than any of the other Larrys(which can boast of having some very obscure, difficult Sierra-style puzzles), and it's very small. The gameplay is not really that challenging. Sure, you'll get stuck in a couple of places, but once you figure out what you need to do you'll feel stupid for having gotten stuck in the first place. It's a very comprehensible, playable game - not an intellectual challenge.
The game's format is far from perfect as well. The parser is limited and somewhat frustrating for us text adventure gamers to tackle. For example, if you try to go around talking to people with the 'say' command you're apt to be frustrated, because in this game to talk to people you just need to type in whatever you want to say - you don't even have to denote who it is you are talking to. This threw me off for a while...I kept wanting to do stuff like 'say Ken sent me' when the game would only accept just 'Kent sent me' - it would look on the former command as a wrong response, and treat it accordingly. Of course, it's not THAT hard to get used to a simpler parser than you usually use, just a little annoying. The graphics(and this is a graphical game) are only decent for the time...which is to say not very good. The later Larry adventures and a few other Sierra games(like Gold Rush to name one off the top of my head) are so well-designed that they make this game look positively primitive in retrospect. That's not even considering the modern 3-D games so popular in this 21st century of ours.
On the other hand, the game obviously has some good points. It's raunchy fun, entertaining and meaningless - a great way to waste a few hours! All interactive fiction exists for entertainment purposes(in some cases certain games exist more for their author's entertainment than the player's...but that's another topic), after all. But some entertainment is better than other entertainment, and some games are more complicated and rewarding than others. In short: if you're a really horny guy and simply looking for mindless entertainment, Leisure Suit Larry 1: Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards is probably about the best game you could possibly come across. If you're a girl...errr, haven't you got better things to do?
Simple Rating: 6/10
Complicated Rating:
Story: 5/10
Writing: 5/10(There's not that much writing, after all...)
Playability: 7/10
Puzzle Difficulty: 5/10
Parser Responsiveness: 2/10
Special Ratings For This Game
Sexism: -5/10
Sexy-ism: 4/10
Graphics: 5/10(Would be worse if the girls weren't so pretty...)
Complicated Rating: 28/50
F209 Cat sprach the following on August 20th, 1999:
I demand that any review of LSL1 mention the fact that the entire game was grafted from an earlier Scott Adams-style text adventure called "Softporn Adventure."
That is what I demand.
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