Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail!

The Good
Love for Sail! is the seventh and final LSL game created by Sierra, just before the company folded, and in my opinion, it is an excellent finale to a great series, sporting not only great graphics and a smoothing soundtrack, but also a few features.

Larry Laffer has a bad history with women - most of them having something in common with each other. They ended their relationship with Larry after just one game. Shamara, the last woman he met in La Costa Lotta, upped the anti. Not only does she leave Larry, but she shackles him to their hotel bed and sets fire to it. After finding a way to escape, he decides to take a cruise on the PMS Bouncy where various competitions are held. Win all of them, and you get to spend a week with Captain Thygh.

The first thing I noticed when playing this game is the absence of the familiar icons which you use to interact with anything on the screen, and replacing it is a Windows ’95-style interface. There are no icons to be seen, but the cursor - which looks like a condom - can be moved around. There are also two context menus for the left and right mouse buttons, respectively. (We’ll call it the left and right context menus from now on.), the left context menu can have different options depending on who or what you click on, but the right context menu stays the same, given you quick access to your inventory, save dialogue box, the current score, and something called “The Boss”.

There are bonuses that are included in the game, such as the feature that allows text input. So if you want to go back to the days of LSL2 and LSL3, you can access the parser by clicking on an object and selecting ‘Other…’ from the menu. The more important bonuses, in my opinion, are the 32 red-and-white-striped “Dildos” you have to find in the game, and the CyberSniff 2000. This last feature is available when Larry enters certain locations, and the idea behind it is a 3x3 grid of colored squares is supplied in the box, and whenever a miniature version of it appears, a number flashes. Then you scratch the number on the card that corresponds to what is shown the screen and you get a whiff of that environment. Having said that, it certainly pays to have a physical copy of a game, not a digital download.

LSL7 was made using Sierra’s last revision of the SCI engine, SCI3, the same engine that powered Lighthouse and Phantasmagoria 2. There are no choice of sound cards this time, but the game boasts very colorful graphics. I enjoyed the close-up views of the characters, especially Larry’s. At the end of the fifth game, you read some text that says “Better Babes Through Technology”, and this statement is certainly true in this game. All the women in the game are hot, especially Drew Baringmore. This woman, I imagine her lying on my bed naked at night, and as she was in heat, I entered her and we were rocking up and down to the point that the resulting orgasm was amazing. But I digress.

In my opinion, the humor in LSL7 is even better than previous Larry incarnations. I enjoyed seeing Larry get busted walking back to his cabin in the nude after scoring with a women, the ship’s announcer making announcements over the P.A. system which do not make sense, and even the woman pirate who swears a lot for no reason. (Obviously the developers played Sam & Max Hit the Road.)

The music in LSL7 ranges from easy listening to techno, and Sierra managed to provide snippets of classic ‘70s songs for crucial moments within the game. Neil Ross returns as the narrator, in his slightly aggressive form. As for the sound effects, they are on par with the last two games and the “bodily function” keys are back.

The Bad
To get through the game, you have to win (and cheat) at mini-games. There is one irritating game called “Strip Dice”, where you must get your opponent to remove every bit of her clothing. The game gets more difficult the more you win, but you can also lose as well. Although you can use the old save-and-restore feature from Sierra’s games from the Eighties, this becomes tedious and you can’t even interrupt your game and go somewhere else without restarting the whole thing.

LSL7 is the first and last game to feature an in-game map allowing you to get to places quickly. Having said that, it isn’t well designed. It forces you to hunt around for a minute, trying to find the name of the place you have to go next, among the hundreds of places you can go.

The Bottom Line
The game is my favorite Leisure Suit Larry game of all time. The graphics and sound are amazing, and there are several things to look out for other than trying to complete your main quest. After Sierra completed the game, a sixth sequel was hinted in the game's ending, entitled Leisure Suit Larry 8: Lust in Space. Unfortunately, Sierra was in a world of trouble so this game was cancelled. Goodbye Larry. It’s been nice knowing you.