NOTE: This is a transfer of a review originally posted on the forums. It's now here, so I have all reviews bundled together.

Really, now... I was young, and then to come accross a game about.... SEX!!!!
Yeah, this was one of the first commercial games in which sex plays a very important role and the reactions at the time were therefore overall very extremely negative, but yet Sierra (the company behind the game) quickly found out that the game broke all records in the warez-scene, in other words the world of illegally copied games. How did they know so many people copied this game illegally? Because graphic adventures were not so well-known at the time as they are today, and thus nobody really understood the game, but hey a game about sex had to be explored more, so the sales on the hint books were very very high. Much higher than the sales on the game itself. Sierra made a fortune on a game everybody copied illegally, which was quite a big joke.

There are three versions of this game, in this game I'll limit myself to the "original".... Yeah, you can see I placed "original" in quotes as even that is not entirely right. The very original was a fully text based adventure which was solely written to test a database system and that game was called "Soft Porn". Al Lowe wondered if it was a good idea or not to "translate" that game into their graphic adventure engine and well the rest is history.

One thing the game was hated for were the 5 age verification questions to verify you are really 18 years or older. Sierra did a very bad job realizing that whatever is common knowledge WITHIN the U.S.A. is not always common konwledge OUTSIDE of the U.S.A. and as a result a lot of foreign players were constantly deemed "a kid" because of simply being a foreigner lacking U.S.A.-specific knowledge.
There are lists on the internet with all answers though, as well as a cheat to skip all questions.

If you play this game in ScummVM, I recommend to save the game immediately after aswering all questions as loading a savegame from teh ScummVM loading will then skip all questions. This trick does NOT work when you play the game in DOSBox or a real DOS computer, though.

Now the game starts in front of Lefty's Bar. You can walk around by using the arrow keys and as soon as you want to do something, simply type what you want to do. For example, to enter the bar, walk to the entrance and type "OPEN DOOR". And so it goes through the entire game.

The object of the game is simple to explain. Larry Laffer is a nerd who worked as a computer programmer without having any friends and never caring about it either. But when he reaches his 40s he realizes that he may die a virgin if he lives on this way, so he goes to Lost Wages in order to find the love of his life. You got 1 night to do so. The game starts around 10pm and when it's about 5 or 6am the sun will rise and then your time is up and this will cause Larry to commit suicide meaning the game is over (although not many people know that there is a time limit to this game, and this time limit was removed in the two remakes).

There are countless ways in which Larry can die and you can also get yourself stuck in a no-win situation. You really need to think out well in order to prevent that, and to make a lot of savegames in various files. Adventure games in the 80s were pretty notorious and infamous for this.

One way in which you can die is by trying to leave the scene on foot. You'll be beaten up by some punk, so you'll need to drive around the game by taxi. You need enough money for this because if you don't pay the taxi driver will beat you up and drive over you (killing you).

Now a bit of downside in Larry is the need for money to progress in the game, and you have far too little to cover all the costs you'll have to pay during the game, and the only way to get more money is through... Gambling. You can go for either BlackJack or the slot machines, both are boring and tiresome and also easy to cheat through. Just save before playing and load the savegame if you lose and save if you win. You have have up to $250 and not more (It's pretty obvious because of the max value of 255 in a byte variable). Luck will decide how long it takes to keep your cash up to par. If you get on $0 it will count as a death and the game will be over, so make sure you never run out of cash.

Well one of the good parts is maybe the ability to take girls in close-up and it was pretty astonishing what a good job Mark Crowe did on the girls given the limit graphic possibilities of the technology and the used engine at the time. As you can go "hubba-hubba" over the girls in Larry, it did surprise the developers how well Larry still worked with the female audience, since after all, Larry hints for girls and we will see everything from girls that can make a man go wild... or at least that was the idea. Well Larry is just plain horrible when it comes to approaching women. As a matter of fact he's just a dork and a lot of girls have met a dork during a date and in this game and nearly all its sequels it will become horribly clear that Larry THINKS he's in charge during his dates with girls, but the truth is that THEY are in charge, and this game already shows a fair go in how Larry awaits just plain disaster when the moment appears to have come a woman may drop her clothes for him. It already happens here and this would basically be the trademark that made the series as a whole that popular, and seeing how Larry is getting humiliated or even downright totured by the girls he talks out of their clothes was for some women very satisfying, and thus the game offers a lot for both a male and a female audience.

The disk killer myth

The Disk Killer Myth floating around Larry also shows how little we knew about computers and malware back in the days, or how stories can live their own life. A popular myth says that if you reach the full 222 score your harddrive would be erased.

Well let's be frank here. Which game developer in their right mind would destroy the hard drive of their paying customers, knowing it would damage their reputation leading to bankruptcy and not to mention the legal consequences. Yeah... none right. No Sierra was not that stupid, although they knew about this myth and even parodied it in Space Quest 4 (and Larry 7).

Now the truth about this myth. As I said before in this review, Larry was one of the most pirated games of its time. Now illegally copied games were at the time very well known for being vulnerable to viruses, as most viruses back in those days attached themselves to executable files and would on an other computer activate and copy itself and so on. With a game pirated as much as Larry it was bound to happen a copy with a virus attached to it would someday circulate. Well, if it was just a private computer the world would probably never have known, however, although the rules of most commercial companies forbid it, people did often play games at work and Larry was pretty popular to be played when the boss was not looking. However the payload of the virus went off during worktime and destroyed the computer's haddrive and also a lot of the network files causing a lot of damage for the company, and thus we had very big "booming" news. The game itself got all the blame due to the lack of knowledge about malware and the myth was born.

Is Larry a dangerous game? No! As long as you have a legal copy, you should be fine and if you have an illegal copy just use a DOS-Based virusscanner, which is recommended for a legal copy too, as other software inside your computer or VM can still infect it, but if that happens the game is not to blame, but the infected software that began infecting other stuff. Am I still making sense to you?
Well basically this last paragraph applies to ALL software in the DOS era.

Playing this game in modern times

Well it's good to know that the game works perfectly in DOSBox and ScummVM. No differences when you use a "real" old computer. Sierra published their games for nearly all platforms at the time (DOS, Mac, AMIGA and others), and so if you have a copy for an other system as DOS, ScummVM may be the best choice as it supports all versions.

You can buy a legal copy of the game at gog.com but then you get the entire collection of all Larry games up to Larry 6 (that excludes Larry 7 and Larry 1 RELOADED, but includes Soft Porn and the first remake of Larry 1), although the later episodes may be discussed in separate reviews.

Larry did a rather good job at the time, it had a nice story, humor and offers a challenge for adventure game players. Downsides are the age verification questions being too much focused on a U.S. audience and the numerous ways in which you can get into a "never-win" situation, and you should not expect TOO much when it comes to the sex-part. The type interface may be bothersome if you are used to play adventures with a mouse, but honestly, you'll learn to live with it and it will soon be no bother.
Larry is a classic, especially due to its controversial nature at the time, which made it famous and set out the road for some very good games to come, although I must admit that there are also pretty bad games around in the series, and when I review the other Larry titles you'll find out why I think so.

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