Yes that poncing pervo is back! Larry Laffer hits your computer screens for a fourth time. Eh a fourth time, how can it be a fourth time when this is Leisure Suit Larry 5? Wel my little pervsters, all will be explained... soon. First a little bit of history behind the man in the white polyester suit.

What can be said about Larry Laffer that is suitable to print? Oops, before this review gets too risky I'll have to do something.
Warning - as per usual this Larry game contains adult subject matter and parental guidance while playing the game is advised, so all you kids out there turn the page quickly and ignore the screenshots. Right, I'm now dealing with a mature adult audience.

Larry first appeared on the Amiga games scene a couple of years ago in Land of the Lounge Lizards which involved Larry trying, err, well, to put it bluntly, to sow his wild oats.
Larry 2 was titled Looking for Love in Several Wrong Places which had Larry trying to escape a spy-infested tropical jungle and trying to thwart the plans of the evil Dr Nonookie as well as sowing his wild oats (again).

The third game in the series starred not only Larry, but a certain woman who features heavily in Larry 5 - Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectrals. Larry again had to sow his wild oats while Patti had to rescue him from man-eating cannibal Amazon women.

Now to be honest, the Larry games aren't really that dirty. The first game was fairly smutty, but the sex scenes were fairly naff and you didn't see anything that you wouldn't see on page three of the Sun.
However, lots of people objected and the game designers made Larry 2 a lot les smutty, but - and this is a big but - everyone who bought and loved the first game complained to the game designers saying it wasn't smutty enough.
So lo and behold, the game designers made Larry 3 the smuttiest. The graphics and sound in the first three games were fairly rubbish, but now in Larry 5, Sierra have found a way to convert graphics from the PC, and it has wonderful graphics and mega sound.

Larry 5, which is subtitled Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work, features Patti as a super-secret agent spy working undercover (and under the covers!) for the FBI.

Meanwhile, Larry is working a low-level job for a porno prime-time TV show, America's Sexiest Home Videos, and the mob is out to get pornography out of the living room and back onto the profit sheet.
Together, Larry ad Patti must take on the mob, the FBI, the music industry and the United States Congress in a mix of sex, thuggery and rock 'n' roll.

What the hell happened to Larry 4, you might well be asking. Well the Gamer team still haven't completed Larry 5, but Larry keeps on remembering things throughout the game and wondering himself where Larry 4 has gone, so maybe all will be revealed at the end of this one!

The game can be controlled by mouse or joystick, but to be honest the mouse is the best option. IT uses a new 'click and grope' interface which makes the game easy to control - it also means that there's no typing to do. It's so easy - you click on the walk icon and then click on screen where you want to go and - voila - Larry/Patti walks to the place you clicked on.

It's quite clever. Say you aren't doing very well - the computer will shout at you for being rubbish, but it might also give you a hint or clue on how to complete the part that you are stuck on or give you a friendly shove in the right direction.

The graphics in Larry 5 are fantastic. Sierra must have had a whole load of professional animators working on them.
In fact there were no less than 13 animators and seven background artists working on Larry 5, so we are talking Disney-type quality here. Soundwise? Well put it this way - a guy called Craig Safan composed the music for the game. Wow, I hear you all cry. Well, Craig's work has including composing for the Cheers TV show. The also composed movie scores for films like The Last Starfighter and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 and many others, and has been an Emmy nominee.

So there you have it - a stonking soundtrack. In fact Larry 5 had over 60 people working for it, but hey! the Americans always do things bigger and better.
Larry 5 isn't crude. Well OK it is crude, but not crude as in explicit sex scenes and bad language. It's crude as in sexual innuendo and double entendres. You don't actually see anything, but the implication is there. For instance when Larry is, erm, well let's put it this way, when Larry is getting a bit randy with a young lady under a table, all you see is the expressions on Larry's face. A lot of the humour is fairly childish, but it's not for children if you know what I mean.

There's not really a lot else I can say about the infamous Larry Laffer and his white polyester suit, so I think it's time to end this review before I get into trouble from Mary Whitehouse. If you are a fan of Larry then this is the game that you've been waiting for. Eve if you're not a fan, I'd strongly recommend buying Larry 5 anyway, because that's the kind of guy I am.

The graphics - as I've said before - are fantabulous, and the sound is brill so I can't whinge on that front. What you do need is a hard drive. You can play it using two floppy drives, but it's really a waste of time and energy.
Even if you've got a hard drive, you still have to wait in-between 'scenes' and at points the animation slows down to a snail's pace.

Forgetting all that though, Larry is still a damn fine adventure game and I would say the best yet out of the Larry series. If you want a smutty, sexy, outrageous adventure then Larry 5 is for you.
Right you lot, you can bring your kids back in now - we wouldn't want them to miss the rest of Gamer, would we?

What happens when pretty American boys leave their Tau Beta Kappa fraternity houses? Does their puerile humour get packed away along with the frat rings? Do their desperate attempts to screw any female in sight become subsumed by desperate attempts to screw any developing country in sight? IN short, do they grow up? Yes and no. Yes, they stop walking around with their underpants over their Levi's - they wear suits instead - but no, their humour remains the same, it just gets more expensive. Take the LSL series of games starring the almost certainly impotent Larry Laffer.

Larry is what people back in the Forties and Fifties used to call a Lounge Lizard. Now that there are no lounges, we would be more inclined to call him 'Essex Man' or even 'Plonker'. He dresses like John Travolta's rather less talented brother, has a head that is so out of proportion to his cartoon-like body that it looks like he must pump it up with helium every morning, and he gets involved in lots of gorgeously drawn, but essentially tiresome, adventures.

Larry is a legend in the same mould as Carry One films and the Cannonball Runs. The first few were wonderful - all double entendre, risque humour, and crass allusion - but the next 65 versions go nowhere.

Driller killer
LSL 5 sees Larry and his paramour (dream on Laz) Passionate Patty battling it out against the mob. The fact that you get to play Patti as well as Larry, appears to be a concession to the rather strange idea that women might be sentient beings too. But this image is soon shattered by a scene featuring the undercover FBI spyette being fitted for some hush-bush equipment by a gynecologist wielding a drill and wearing a miner's hat. Call me prudish but this image

Ah yes, the plot. Briefly, Patti is working for the FBI in a bid to stop the Mob from making vast sums of money out of cheap, tacky, exploitative porn (sounds familiar). Larry is, unwittingly, working for the Mob as he hunts down the most beautiful women in the world in order to make a cheap, tacky exploitative television show.

Little does he know that the Mob want to get the program banned so that they can sell under-the-counter video copies of it at highly-inflated prices. Oh what lars as Patti and Larry work at cross purposes but really together... but is it really together? Ah the complexity of this adventure is enough to blow-off your mind.

Luckily, for the game and the aspirant adventurer, the backgrounds and characters are drawn with an almost Hanna Barbera stylishness - there are even a few digitised images hanging around the place. It looks great. Even the interface is quite neat. It is icon driven and gives you options such as talk, take and walk. Simple to use, it is tried-and-tested and unless your mouse is having convulsions, it should cause you little or no grief.

Do you have a hard one?
Unluckily, unless you have a hard disk and even then plenty of patience, any suspension of disbelief that you might have been able to work up disappears like an afterglow in an abattoir as you make your way through numerous disk changes.

As an adventure game, it's not really up to much. You click on things and ask a few predefined questions. The backgrounds are wonderful to look at, but there is very little to do - if it was a text-only adventure the message "You can't use that", would crop up more than once.

Essentially you are lead to the correct conclusions. The tricks and puzzles are classic Sierra, to buy air tickets you have to have plastic, but you neeed to use the right plastic in the right place. So you spend ages working out the programmer's (Al Lowe - "a jazz musician who regularly practices safe sax") idiosyncratic logic.

This logic probably means a great deal to those members of the Tau Beta Kappa fraternity house who think that Porky's is a documentary drama and that women are only good at two things (and some of them can't even cook). But to the rest of the world this is the kind of game that might be played after a few points on a rainy night in prison.

From the 'parental discretion' warning on the box to the scantily clad female flesh scattered throughout the packaging, it's clear that Sierra is perfectly happy to keep the Leisure Suit Larry series where it's always been, walking the sidewalks of Sleazeville.

For those of you unfamiliar with the sexploits of Larry Laffer, a 40-year-old self-styled ladies man and celebrated (?) no-hoper, his story began in 1988 in Sierra's The Land Of The Lounge Lizards. His mission? To 'score with a chick', of course. Thus the formula for this phenomenally successful innuendo-laden interactive adventure series was born - a point-and-click romp through a series of pre-defined encounters, each with a puzzle or two to be solved.

His next two adventures - Looking For Love In Several Wrong Places and Passionate Patti In Pursuit Of The Pulsating Pectorals - further explored the lower echelons of locker-room humour, adding a spot of KGB-embroiled intrigue and introduced us to Passionate Patti, nightclub pianist-cum-FBI agent and foil to Larry's ineptitude.

And so now we come to game number five. Hang on a minute, though - can't somebody count around here? Whatever happened to LSL4?
Well, it's a joke, you see. Apparently Patti has run of it. LSL4: The Missing Floppies details Larry's and Patti's passionate affair which happened after LSL3, you see, and there ain't no way she's letting us look at it. A shame.
Hence the latest installment - Leisre Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti Does A Little Undercover Work. Larry finds himself working for a TV company specialising in pornography (surprise, surprise) and is given the job of finding the sexiest woman in America to star in a new show.

Meanwhile, the Mob is keen to get porn off the TV and profitably back under the counter - to this end, it is engaged in making sure the show gets banned. Patti's task is to finger the man behind the mob which, as one might guess from the title, is more than likely to entail her taking her clothes off and having sex with people. Good for her - I understand it's a very old and revered profession.

So far, so smutty. The adventure, if you will, kicks off with Larry setting out to find three sexy women and videos his 'dealings' with them so his boss can appraise their performance. Hidden around the TV company offices are a selection of items that will enable Larry to travel, find the women and bring back the footage. Your actions - for you, of course, play Larry - are carried out by means of cursors, each having a different function which can be selected from a pull-down menu at the top of the screen or by cycling through them with the right-hand mouse button.

For example, if you want to find out more about the lampshades, select the Look icon, click on the shades and a message ('they're just hanging around, just like your Larry') will appear. There are actions icons for walking and talking and one for manipulating an object, which is great fun when you click it on Larry as the message implies that he's fondling himself. Oh, what a hoot.

Each time you collect the right object, which goes into Larry's inventory, a little 'ping' sounds to tell you you've done the right thing and off you go to the next scene. At this point it's wise to put the kettle on for, even when installed ona hard drive, the story update is sloooow.

Indeed, if there's one thing sure to sabotage the Amiga version far beyond the soon-wearing nature of the subject matter, it's this. It's yawnsville, alright - and it's not as if you can sit back and admire the gorgeous graphics on display while your drive grunts away, either. Perspective and proportion have gone out of the window in favour of a stylished comedic setting, but the drawings look clumsy and do little to draw you into the action. The animation is worse.

However, the game does have variety on its side. If you tire of playing Larry, just wait till he falls asleep on the airplane en route to his first steamy encounter. At this point, if you can prevent yourself from joining him in Nodland, you get the chance to - hurrah! - play Patti.

Having found herself made redundant from her job as a singer/pianist, she is enlisted into the FBI - fairly standard recruitment practice I believe - and set loose to uncover the Mob. And here's where LSL5 starts to get stupid.

During her induction into the Bureau, you may laugh as a technician is carried off-screen by a heat-seeking vibrator. Or titter as another is blown to pieces bya pair of false-breast mounted cannon. Or chortle as yet another technician is propelled across the lab by his own flatulence. Or you might not. By the time of a FBI's gynecologist started to fit Patti with an in-body tracking device I'd more than had enough.

LARRY'S BLINDINGLY SMUTTY HUMOUR
And there's more side-splitting eroticism to come as the game switches back to Larry. My first trembling foray had him travel to New York to meet the first of his quarry in the Hard Disk Cafe - bit of a computer joke there, eh, tech-heads?

After getting past the snooty maitre d' and striking up a conversation with one of the three sexiest women in America, Larry is treated to the sight of her doing something original with a banana dessert, followed by - but, ah. If you're even going to consider buying the game we don't want to spoil all the thrills, now, do we? Suffice to say, it'll appeal to those who get eye strain at the newsagent through ogling the top-shelf mags while fumbling for their copy of AP...

So where does this leave us. Well, with a very average graphic adventure game saddled with a lot of distinctly sub-Carry On perv jokes. I've seen reviews of LSL before and Sierra is not ashamed to quote glowing approval from Playboy, Rolling Stone and the Wall Street Journal in its blurb. Such publications are obviously off on the 'it's harmless risque fun' and the 'golly, isn't it amazing what you can do with porn and computers' angle so beloved of our tabloids, and I suppose we can forgive them - they don't know what a good computer game looks like.

For the rest of us though, it's all rather sad. If we put aside prudishness for a moment, I'm perfectly prepared to believe that there is a place for sexy, adult adventure games - but they have to be well put together too. My apologies to Larry Laffer's creator Al Lowe, who must have had a good time thinking up the various 'funnies' here, but this simply isn't a good game.

In brief them: it's painfully slow, the puzzles are in some cases insoluble without the hunt manual, the animation is so-so, the graphics are average... In short, it's a trial to play. As for the humour, well, that's entirely a matter of taste. If you're the sort of person likely to blurt embarrassing one-liners in the style of Finbarr Saunders then you may find yourself outclassed, or outcrassed, by some of the jokes in LSL. (Then again, you'll be just as satisfied by a copy of Viz, which is almost 40 times cheaper). The accompanying booklet describes Larry as the consummate ladies man (sic) and yet, to paraphrase, only rarely does LSL manage to consummate anything at all. Laugh? I nearly did.

I 've been a fan of Larry Laffer's antics ever since I first saw him strut across a grainy ST screen, and each successive adventure has taken the games one enjoyable step further. This, the fifth in the series, has now done away with the text entry system of the past games, and, most notably, Larry has changed from a white-suited stick figure to a swaggering nerd - complete with bald spot.

Al Lowe's Larry character resembles someone we all know, and his adventures as he tries to bed countless women are akin to the Carry On series of films. This time, he shares the billing with the Passionate Patty character who appeared in Larry III, and who is the nearest female equivalent to our hero you are ever likely to meet.

We are reacquainted with Larry as he skivvies away for a Mafiosa-style bunch of TV networkers. With their subliminal messages and porn videos losing sales to cable TV, their Mr Big cracks the idea of coming up with a 'Blind Date'-style show where the nerdy host must locate and bed the sleaziest old boiler in America - the nation will then be outraged, and the under-the-counter market for the series will boom!

If ever a person was destined for the job, Larry's the man. Thus, armed with the names of the three proposed contestants, Larry must jet off to each destination in search of a couch to cast them on. Meanwhile, Patty has been fired from her singing job, only to be approached by the FBI to crack Mr Big's plan.

Thus, as the plot switches between the duo's hapless escapades in a series of object-related puzzles, they eventually meet up to crack a plan which will, hopefully mean that everything works out nicely - possibly resuming the romance nether can remember from the last game, too?

Apart from the improved and simpler control system there's not a lot left to be said about Larry V. Fans of the series know what to expect, but this sequel seems to be slightly easier than the previous adventures. Graphically and sonically, it's the best yet, with plenty of hidden in-jokes and saucy postcard humour which just misses the 'too risky' mark (the ability to raise the 'filth' level is sorely missed, though).

The plot, however, is a little uninspired compared to the tropical paradise and spies mix, or the sheer pulling japery of the first games. A little pricey at its thirty-five quid tag, I came away from Larry V neither particularly impressed or disappointed. It's still a cracking yarn, and one that I think will end up I many a casual adventurers' software library. It certainly deserves to.

In keeping with the sexist slant of this month's issue, what games mag would be complete without the inclusion of Larry Laffer, the leching Leisure Suit lout. And here he is again, in the Amiga version of Leisure Suit Larry V, tantalisingly subtitled Passionate Patti Does A Little Undercover Work (all together now: oo-bloomin' er).

However, the fifth game of this popular Sierra saga, in a frantic attempt to pacify women's lib, breaks new ground in allowing you to view the characters from two perspectives - Larry's and Patti's. Of course, most of the game is still viewed from Larry's angle, and us girls just have to grit our teeth and bare... sorry, bear with it.

This time, our Larry finds himself working for an entertainment porn company (quelle surprise) in Hollywood. After irritating his boss in his own inimitable way, Larry is given the task of finding the sexiest woman in American, through personal experience (hem hem).

His dream come true, one might think. But the reason for Larry's assignment is that the company wants to make a cable TV porn series called America's Sexiest Home Videos, so three guesses as to who's going to do the secret filming.

Patti and Larry's lives become inextricably linked when she's sacked for her singing effort at a scummy sleaze bar. The FBI hire Patti to help them uncover the corruption in the American music business. By a strange coincidence, Larry's boss and the man behind the corruption are the same person. And that's all I'm going to tell you - apart from the fact that Larry's search for chicks has thankfully been narrowed down to three.

Amaya: Leisure Suit Larry V is Tacksville, Arizona. But then there's something quite warm and friendly about tack, isn't there? Everyone's had a nice Crimplene jumper or a porcelain poodle at some time in their lives - except perhaps the Queen (and she makes up for it with her hats).

And however much I tried to hate Larry, the varied locations and, dare I say it, the Zipper icon really made me want to continue. In addition, the Sierra point-and-click interface is very easy to use: a row of icons at the top of the screen represent the usual Walk, Examine, Pick Up and Speak commands, but you'll have to use your imagination to deduce what the extra Zipper icon does. Sometimes you have to be very pixel perfect when clicking on an object, however this is only a minor niggle.

The graphics ar rather good with plenty of places to explore: from the interiors of a flash limo and an aeroplane to the inside of a mud wrestling club and a sleazy bar. The sound complements the graphics nicely - catchy, jazzy little tunes and the odd digitised voice. It's a considerate touch that for some of the game you get to play Patti - and even get to put your passion to the test.

Nevertheless, this game is Macho with a capital M. If Larry plays his cards right, he can have rudies with up to four women. The irritating thing here is the lack of realism. I mean, to be honest - would you get off with Larry? Come on, all you girls out there - answer me? No, of course you wouldn't - unless you'd had 20 vodkas and wearing a blindfold. I also found the humour a tad annoying (apart from the Dan Quayle bit) - but if corny sexual innuendo has a place anywhere, then it's in this game.

My major worry is the disk-swopping and loading waits. This is always a problem with Sierra games ported straight across to the Amiga - unless you have a hard disk - and even with an external drive, the seven disks make it a bit of a faff. But Leisure Suit Larry V is very easy to get into and, although experienced adventurers may not find the puzzles challenging enough, I feel that Mike was a bit hard in his review of the PC version.

It's tasteless and good fun to play for if every a game was the epitome of 'oo-er-ism', Leisure Suit Larry V is it. Except, that is someone knows of a Benny Hill game.