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Leisure Suit Larry 6 LSL6 plays a lot like the very first LSL game as it doesn't feature Passionate Patti. This time, Larry gets picked up by a TV Dating show's producer and is assigned to be a contestant, even though the show is rigged. He loses and is sent to a luxury spa for the weekend as a consolation prize. This being a Leisure Suit Larry game, the spa is chock full of women whom you must convince to sleep with you. Why? Well.. because you're Leisure Suit Larry, and that's pretty much all you do.. in every game.. including this one. This is one of Sierra's final adventure games, which is evidenced by the high quality graphics and sound effects. It still doesn't help the gameplay much, however. LSL6 is chock full of the obscure puzzles so prevalent to Sierra games.. though the game does give you a break by not having any "gotcha" puzzles.. at least that I ran into. As in the first Leisure Suit Larry, the ultimate goal is to ascend to the penthouse and make out with the "hottest girl" in the whole place. In terms of story, there's not a lot here. It's a missing element that just doesn't live up to Larry 2, 3, or 5. Overall Score: 5 of 10 Quality Rating: 5 of 5 Pass! |
Leisure Suit Larry 5 LSL5 begins with Larry's quest to find the 3 most talented women to host "America's Sexiest Home Videos" and then.. sleep with them. The idea being that if they'll sleep with Larry, they'll sleep with anything. Meanwhile, Passionate Patti (the female protagonist of the Leisure Suit Larry series) gets recruited by the feds to uncover the source of subliminal messages in music. The game is split into chapters. First, you play Larry's part, then you switch into Patti's part. The entire point of this game is to cram in as much sexual innuendo jokes as possible. Puzzles here are standard Sierra gameplay puzzles, and are a little harder than average in difficulty. The game relies on obscure background art as being the key to proceed at some points. It also contains a mandatory slot machine gambling game that is no fun, but thankfully it doesn't last too long. As it turns out, if you play this game when you're not 14 years old, you get a lot more of the jokes. Go figure. The game takes about 6 or 7 hours to beat. Overall Score: 7 of 10 Quality Rating: 4 or 5 Play it! |
Codename: Iceman It's the story of Navy Commander John Westland as he is called into service on a covert mission to rescue the US Ambassador to "the middle east" who has been kidnapped in Tunisia, but most of the game is about just getting to Tunisia aboard a submarine. The gameplay is your standard Sierra SCI fare. Keyboard arrow keys for movement, typing interface for instructions. Iceman is regarded as one of the more difficult Sierra games as it is unforgiving with the puzzles, and there are death traps everywhere. It also has 5 or 6 copy protection checkpoints, which is steep, even for a game of this era. The first checkpoint, for instance, is performing the correct steps for CPR. Iceman also likes to play "gotcha" with you. "Gotcha" is when you pick up some widget in the first few minutes of the game, and you can't complete the game without that widget.. but the game lets you proceed past the widget, play through the whole entire game, and get to the point where you need the widget, only to get stuck. Gotcha puzzles are common to Sierra games, but rarely are there so many in the same game. For this playthrough, I remembered most of the game's more difficult sequences. As a kid, I kept getting stuck trying to enter Tunisia. I would always get detected by magnetic sensors in the bay.. but this time I discovered an item I was missing all those years ago that allowed me to pass through undetected. How did I miss it? Well... It was part of a horrible, horrible dice game. A mandatory horrible dice game. Sierra is no stranger to mandatory gambling. Space Quest 1 featured it, Police Quest 1 had it, as did Leisure Suit Larry 5 (the next game in my list). While those other games the gambling is merely unenjoyable.. in Iceman the gambling is downright hellacious. Iceman took me about 7 hours to beat, 5 of which were spent playing that horrible, horrible dice game. Mandatory gambling brings this game down by far. Of course, the game has other problems as well. Driving the submarine is pretty neat, but the submarine battles are also nightmares. Torpedo hits are at random, so you will often lose a battle even though you did nothing wrong. Overall, I'd say that Codename: Iceman is one of the lesser in a pantheon of great games. It's needlessly difficult, and the puzzles aren't hard to figure out, they're just complicated. Overall Score: 5 of 10 Quality Rating: 3 of 5 Pass, unless you are a Sierra nerd. |
Below the Root The thing with Below the Root is that you can't just play it. This game was created by the author of some moderately popular young adult fantasy novels known as the "Green Sky Trilogy". These novels ended in a cliffhanger, and so this game was created to be the end of the story. All that is well and good, and I'm all for tying a game into extended media.. but if you just try to play this game straight up without reading the books, you're going to have an impossible time of it. After all, I had been trying to beat the game for 27 freaking years. Having never read the books the game is based on. I just couldn't bring myself to invest that much into the game. So, for this particular playthough, I went ahead and found a walkthrough. Cheating? I say nay, as the game depends on knowledge of the books and I only used the walkthrough whenever I got stuck. The game gives you a choice of 6 or so characters to play as, but they all look and operate pretty much the same. Some are stronger, some are better with magic. I chose a dude named Neric, who seemed to be average in all respects. The game plays like a side-scrolling version of a Sierra game if it made a baby with a Lucasarts adventure. Keyboard controls movement, but the command system is a lot like SCUMM. When you play Below the Root, your objective is not particularly obvious. It's an open world, so you wander around talking to the people who live in this giant tree. Some of the people help you with good advice and items. Other people want you dead, and give you bad advice or kidnap you. As you bump into random people, you begin to get sort of.. prodded to go in certain directions, or visit certain people and talk to them. There are 5 of these people you need to talk to, and they all teach you a new magic skill. The main objective of the game is to find the spiritual leader of the people in Green Sky, who are currently divided over racial issues between guys who eat meat, and guys who don't eat meat. Only this spiritual leader guy is able to unite the two factions and bring peace to green sky. He's sort of like a bad graphics white Martin Luther King. The people of Green Sky believe that this leader has drowned, and that there is no hope. Nevertheless, it's your job to find him. How do you know he's still alive? I have no idea! As it turns out, this leader did not drown, he got swept into an underground aquifer where he became trapped on a ledge, unable to escape.. that's where you and your magical powers come in, as one of them is the ability to teleport! Below the Root is a solid game with the traditional puzzles typical of 1980's adventure games. The gameplay is solid, and is focused more on problem solving than combat. It took me about 4 hours to complete it with the assistance of a walkthrough. As it turns out, my last save on this game (dated 2001) was almost to the end.. I had found the spirit leader, but I did not have the teleport magic to beat the game.. No wonder I was hung up on the game for so long! Overall Score: 7 of 10 Quality Rating: 2 of 10 Play it! |
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