Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work

The Good
The graphic is very nice (scanned handpainted backgrounds) and I just love the music. It's easy to complete, but you have fun while doing it.

The Bad
You have to play on the casino to win money (as usual in the these games), but it's not that hard to win and actually it's quite fun even if it interupts the ordinary game. The plot is sleazy and stupid and so the jokes... but's that's why I like it I suppose :-).

The Bottom Line
I played this first time when it was new at a friends PC. I was then impressed by the nice graphic, the fun sampled sounds and the sleazy music. I have played it several times since and I still love it.

The Good
The last time we saw Larry Laffer, he was wondering around Nontoonyt Island, doing nice things to every girl he met, and he was lucky that he screwed every one of them. Eventually, we found him programming Leisure Suit Larry 1, while spending the night with Passionate Patti, his one true love. Al Lowe initially intended for the LSL series to be a trilogy, therefore the series would have ended with number three. It was later revealed that LSL4 would be a multiplayer adventure game, but that never saw the light of day.

Both Larry and Patti also feature in this game. Each character has an assignment that seems to be connected with the other. While Larry's assignment is to audition three hostesses to appear on a popular TV program under certain conditions, Patti has to go undercover for the FBI to stamp out any corruption in the music industry. Of these two, I have to say that Larry's is interesting since he eventually has to use a camcorder to film the bizarre actions of the finalists.

In LSL5, the player controls both protagonists. But instead of spending the first half of the game as Larry and the other as Patti, you will go back and forth between them when the active character has completed a portion of their assignment and is traveling to their next location. There is copy protection, but this only applies to Larry's part. This is where you have to look up something in your documentation and enter five symbols that correspond to the location where you want to go next. The paper that serves as the copy protection sheet has some humorous names that go with the humor of the game.

It doesn’t hurt to enjoy the many jokes the game offers. For example, read the many ads in the airport terminal, or listen very carefully how the boss and the president mispronounce Larry’s name (ie: Daffer, Luffner, Lenny, Lipper). Oh, Larry happens to save the plane carrying the vice president’s wife, and you do this by clicking like hell on the controls. Then there's the dreams the characters have when they are traveling to their next destination. I quite enjoyed Patti fantasizing about Donald Trump and Bill Gates.

The hand-painted backgrounds look good, and both the icon bar and the control bar are quite colorful. I like the appearance of the dialog boxes, which you have a certain amount of time to read. In the control panel, the text slider is ideal for people who are slow readers. With these cartoon-style graphics, Patti looks sexier than ever. Sierra recommends this game to mature players due to its adult content.

The music in this game is excellent. I liked the tunes when Larry is in Atlantic City, but mainly whenever Patti is in control. You get to hear most of the soundtrack through a stereo in one of the rooms at PornProdCorp. The sound effects blend in with what Larry and Patti are doing, and you get to hear them all at the end of the game, post credits (if your sound cards has DAC). It was Al Lowe who invented the game’s “bodily function” keys. To hear them, all you have to do is just press one of the unused function keys to hear a disgusting sound. I don't see much point to this, other than create some sort of “rap” of them.

Unlike previous Larry adventures, LSL5 has alternate solutions throughout the game, and these solutions add to the replayability of the game. An example of alternate solution is at the dentist, where you can wrap a doily around your head and pretend to be in real pain, instead of phoning up for an appointment with Chi Chi Lambada. As far as I know, the fifth game is the only one that has these alternate solutions.

The Bad
For the first (and only) time in LSL history, there is password protection in the game. I don't mind it as a way to prevent minors from playing the game, but it gets annoying if you start up LSL5 and want to restore a game, and this happens every time. There is no typing meaning that your interactivity with the environment is reduced. Finally, you cannot die in the game, which is the shame because I enjoyed reading those humorous dialog boxes.

The Bottom Line
If you enjoy the previous Larry games, you will definitely like LSL5. It may have the same amount of jokes and the same protagonists you get to control, but the graphics are gorgeous and the sound is excellent. There are also alternate solutions that make the game worth playing more than once. At the very end, you get to hear someone say “Better Babes Through Technology”. Now, I have to agree with whoever said that. The babes are definitely better in the next game, as well as the one after that, but it's too bad that Patti doesn't look any better.

The Good
Larry 5 represents a new angle for the Larry games. While the previous three featured your standard Sierra adventure art and design (characters that looked as real as a jumble of 16-color pixels could), Larry 5 eschewed realism for a cartoony, lighthearted feel. This new breed of aesthetics definitely works in the context of the game world-unlike in previous Larry adventures, nothing is ever REALLY meant to be taken at all seriously. This, coupled with Al Lowe's typically engaging sense of humor and flair for puns, makes Larry 5 at least an entertaining ride.

The Bad
When played back to back with Larry 3 (the precursor in the series), it's easy to see Larry 5's main weaknesses. As the first Larry game to abandon the parser interface in favor of the mouse-driven icon interface, a great deal of interactivity just seems to be lost. This can probably be best attributed to the programmers' inexperience rather than to any inherent flaws in the interface itself. And, as other reviewers have noted, Larry 5 is pretty easy and shouldn't take too long to breeze through. Finally, the ending is quite a letdown (a continual problem with Larry games, it seems).

The Bottom Line
It's everything you know about Larry, plus icons and a new look. But really, don't start here if you're a Larry virgin-you'd best play the first three games to truly experience the genius of Leisure Suit Larry.