Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places)

Larry Laffer thought he had it all when he finally hooked up with Eve after his night out on the town in Lost Wages, figuring that he might as well move in with her in beautiful Los Angeles. Sadly, it seems as though Larry's jumped the gun, as Eve wasn't looking for anything but a one-night stand, and Larry's left on his own with barely a dollar to spend on the streets of L.A. Thanks to a lucky investment, Larry's luck turns right around again, as within minutes he not only wins a luxurious cruise with Barbara Bimbo on The Dating Connection, but a million dollars to spend via the Luck-o Buck-o Lottery, and sets sail to see if he might find the love of his life on his new adventure... assuming he doesn't get caught by the mad Dr. Nonokee or the KGB, having unwillingly involved himself in an international espionage incident and wound up with an immeasurably valuable onklunk in his hands.

Such is the plot of Leisure Suit Larry goes Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places), Al Lowe's successful sequel to his previous hit Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. While the game continues the story right where the first one leaves off, there are a couple of notable changes to the format: instead of adventuring around one city, Larry's travels take him from Los Angeles, to a cruise boat, to a tropical island, to another island via a plane, all in sequence, with no chance to backtrack between locations. The linear plot was written so that players wouldn't have to swap disks every ten minutes, but in practice, it also meant that the game was notoriously easy to get into an Unwinnable state, forcing many players to start all over.

Another noticable change was in the game's tone compared to its predecessor: Sierra wanted the game to be more accessible, believing the first game's sales to have suffered thanks to its status as a "porno game", so for Larry 2, much of the sexual content was nowhere to be found, and instead of looking for quick and easy sex, Larry's on a quest to find true love instead. Fans of the first game didn't like the shift in tone very much.

Despite sharing many of the attributes that made Sierra games shine, Larry 2 is mostly remembered today not for its funny writing or clever puzzles (even though those can be found in the game), but mostly for its unfair and maddening difficulty, along with a final puzzle that's notorious for requiring a very specific command because of a last-minute programming error.


 * Accidental Hero: Larry is one here. He ends up intercepting a packet of classified stolen documents from a Soviet spy, evading all their attempts to reclaim it, and ultimately destroying them... all without ever knowing that he ever had said documents, was being hunted, or had destroyed them. He was also intentionally trying to defeat Dr. Nonookee, but the method by which he did so makes it clear that most of the actions involved in the process were accidental.
 * Alliterative Name: Barbara Bimbo and Biff Barf.
 * Alliterative Title: Leisure Suit Larry 2: Looking For Love (in Several Wrong Places).
 * Apathetic Citizens: Everyone. They don't care if you are drugged, choking to death, drowning, or dying of bad food. In fact, they ALL WANT YOU TO DIE! Except for the hairstylists, that is. For instance, during the airport segment of the game, you find a suitcase with a ticking bomb in it and you decide to get it out of there before it kills everybody. You shout that you have a bomb and that everybody should get to safety, and they all ignore you. Even the guard seen in the way out (a local who knows just basic English) is informed of the bomb and replies "Have a nice day".
 * Arbitrarily-Large Bank Account: Early on, Larry wins the lottery, meaning he'll get one million dollars per year for the rest of his life. He initially receives a one million dollar bill. It's useless until you can get it broken down into bill form, but after that, you have effectively infinite money. Of course, by the end of the game, you'll have spent most of it on junk, lost the remainder, and the lottery went bankrupt.
 * Artifact of Doom: The onklunk. Once you get it, everyone wants you dead. Seriously.
 * Blunt Yes: When Larry decides to crawl under chains on his ship, he wonders whether he isn't hundreds of miles from shore. The narrator responds with "Yes!" and then it's game over.
 * Game Breaking Bug: A devious glitch with the Text Parser snuck into the game just the night before the game shipped: Near the end of the game, the player is expected to combine an airsick bag with a bottle (to make a Molotov cocktail, the bag serving as its wick). The only acceptable input is some variation of "put airsick bag in bottle" because a) the parser is (badly) written specifically to understand fully formed English phrases instead of "adventure game shorthand", b) a completely unrelated bug had just been fixed by another coder by turning the word "bag" into a verb, and c) no one cared to fix it in time because Sierra's testing policy at the time was to use the longest possible phrase in a situation and see if it worked. Contrary to popular belief, the input does not require the word "the" several times, the point is that "airsick bag" works, whereas the common shorthand "bag" doesn't (since it's a verb).
 * Get on the Boat: This game involves Larry winning an oodle of cash and a luxury cruise for two in the first ten minutes of gameplay, and the story proper continues as soon as Larry gets on the boat. Of course, getting on the boat serves as one of the first bottlenecks in the game, seeing as you need the Grotesque Gulp, the sunscreen and the swimsuit to progress later on, and you can't go back and get them after you get on the boat.
 * Gigantic Gulp: One puzzle involves a 32-gallon drink.
 * Groin Attack: After Larry gets seduced by one of Dr. Nonookee's henchwoman, she takes him to the base and tells him to lay on the bed, before turning on a laser that splits him in half. It goes groin first, and as the narrator says, it brings a whole new meaning to the term "dismemberment"!
 * Hammerspace: Lampshaded with the Gigantic Gulp drink, which Larry muses for a moment as to how he's going to carry it, before shrugging and stuffing it into his pants. Also a case of Hollywood Density, since 32 gallons of soda would weigh more than Larry does, and that's not counting the weight of the other things in his inventory, like $890,000 in hundred dollar bills. Not bad for an out of shape middle-aged programmer.
 * Half the Man He Used To Be: After Larry gets seduced by one of Dr. Nonookee's henchwoman, she takes him to the base and tells him to lay on the bed, before turning on a laser that splits him in half, and after he's split, he's dropped to a pool of hydrofluoric acid.
 * Hash House Lingo: When ordering a "Blue Pate" special at the airport, the woman behind the counter yells to the kitchen to "slop up another bald one!".
 * The Maze: Actually subverted. About halfway through, Larry has to cross a long, narrow, winding path above a tall cliff to reach the airport. In a game where practically everything else will kill you, it's literally impossible to fall off in this scene; instead, Larry narrowly avoids falling off, and you actually gain points. You lose the extra points once you finish crossing though.
 * Molotov Cocktail: You have to create one by combining a bottle of hair product with an air sickness bag as the "wick".
 * Morally-Ambiguous Doctorate: Dr. Nonookee is such a character, of the James Bond spy flick Evil Overlord variety, completely Played for Laughs.
 * Ominous Fog: The dense fog on Nontoonyt Island that appears and dissipates rather rapidly is a smokescreen for Dr. Nonookee's evil schemes.
 * Piranha Problem: Failing a specific timing puzzle results in Larry falling into waist-deep water. He notes that there's a weird tingling sensation, then climbs out of the river to find that piranhas have stripped everything below his waist to the bone. Notably, the game ends not because he dies, but because he lost his manhood and can't go on.
 * Running Gag: Among others: "Don't all barber shops look alike?" and "But then, you find any kind of woman attractive."
 * Shoplift and Die: If Larry attempts to shoplift from Quikie Mart, the southern woman behind the counter will shoot him, resulting in a game over.
 * Squashed Flat: Happens to Larry after Mama jumps on him. This results in a game over.
 * Tagline: "If you look up the word "nerd" in the dictionary, you're liable to find Leisure Suit Larry's picture as a definition."
 * Unwinnable By Mistake: A programmer fixed one error, but accidentally caused another one by defining "bag" as a verb. That means that, in the last puzzle, you can't say "Put bag in bottle", which causes Larry to throw the bottle into the volcano without lighting it on fire, making the game unwinnable. You have to specify the bag. "The bag", "brown bag" and "airsick bag" are all acceptable, just "bag" is not.
 * You Can't Get Ye Flask: One of the most infamous cases in the series of an obvious action not being possible for no discernible reason is found here. The player is supposed to make a bomb out of a hair lotion bottle and use an airsick bag as the wick. However, typing "bag" does not work: it has to be referred to as an "airsick bag". This was caused by a bug that was not caught in testing, as the bug was discovered only a very short time before the development deadline. A programmer had changed the word "bag" from a noun to a verb to fix an unrelated bug, and testing was done by inputting as complete a sentence as possible in the Text Parser used. By using the definite article the in front of bag, it was identified as a noun by the parser... something most people didn't bother with normally.
 * Zillion-Dollar Bill: You get a million dollar bill. Fortunately, there's a store in town that sells $100,000 (plus tax) speedos, and is able to give change in 100s.