Description
Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work! is (despite the number) the fourth game in
Al Lowe's Leisure Suit Larry series. The middle-aged would-be-womanizer Larry Laffer fell off a boat during a cruise and sustained amnesia, forgetting how he and his sweetheart Patti got separated, how Larry got a job in LA, how Patti got a job with the FBI, and what happened in (the never released)
Larry 4. Now Larry and Patti are working independently on two cases that are connected to each other, even though the heroes aren't aware of that. Larry's new bosses are involved in shady business, while Patti agrees to take a break from her career as a performing pianist and become an undercover agent. Will the two be together ever again?
Unlike the previous games with their text input,
Larry 5 utilizes a graphical, icon-based interface. The player uses verb commands ("Look", "Talk", "Use" etc.) to interact with the environment. In a way not quite typical for Sierra's adventure games, it is impossible to "die" in
Larry 5, and the amount of "dead ends" (unwinnable situations) is greatly reduced. The game is also less puzzle-oriented, allowing the player to proceed even if he/she fails to solve the required puzzle in some cases. However, the player is awarded more points for finding the "right" solution. As in the
third game, both Larry and Patti are available as playable characters during different chapters of the story.
Alternate Titles
- "LSL5" -- Common abbreviated / informal title
- "Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti se fait Détective Privée" -- French Title
- "Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti macht beim Geheimdienst mit" -- German Title
- "Larry 5: Fala milosci" -- Polish Title
- "Larry 5" -- Common informal title
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Trivia
Wait a second… Larry 3, Larry 5… where’s the 4th episode? There’s never been one.
The Larry series was originally planned as a trilogy. If you saw the ending of the
third game, you know that it’s well-rounded and final. When designer
Al Lowe had finished Larry 3 in 1989, he was somewhat fed up with his creation, and announced that there’d “never be a Larry 4!”
At least not a “normal” adventure game. In 1989, Sierra had ambitious plans to build up an online gaming community. Nobody knew if this would work, but it was clear that it needed a “killer application”; an online adventure game with a score of players working together simultaneously. That’s what Larry 4 was supposed to be. However, the project turned out to be much more complicated than anyone had expected. As Al Lowe describes on his website:
"After a month or so, we knew we were in trouble. I decided to write a checkers game as a simple test case to see if we could actually move objects and communicate. It worked. But we were still a long way from making characters walk and communicate and interact.
So I wrote a backgammon game. Then chess. Still we had no system to support all the features needed for an adventure game. But we were having so much fun playing against each other, we decided to push what we had into a real product. It became The Sierra Network. TSN was quite successful in its day, especially considering the small numbers of players who also had modems.
Eventually, when TSN was losing 10 million dollars per year,
Ken [Williams] sold half of it to AT&T for 50 million dollars. I laughingly said Sierra was the only company to make money in on-line gaming: by selling out! Later AT&T would pay another 50 mil for the other half. They then sat on it for about a year before giving up and selling the whole thing to America On-Line for 10 million. AOL announced big plans, but never carried through and the whole thing withered up and died without ever seeing the light of day.”
When Al Lowe finally decided that the Larry series needed to be continued, and started to work on the next off-line episode, he was reluctant to call it Larry 4. Hadn’t he exclaimed that there wouldn’t be a game with that name? He kept his promise. The next adventure was a "fifth" game.
Even though the 4th episode does not exist, it has an official name nevertheless:
Leisure Suit Larry 4: The Missing Floppies’.
