When I first played Leisure Suit Larry, I believe I was 13? It took some time to get the answers right so that the game could be played. Some of them were culturally difficult to get right – I mean from someone who was raised on 1 TV channel, how would we be expected to know who ‘Annette Funicello’ was? I was young and immature – this game informed me of things like condoms, which I didn’t actually know about until that time (wow! complete time-warp here). My father was a pharmacist. At the time this game was available, he did not sell condoms. There was a lawsuit pending in relation to the supply of condoms from a vending machine in, if I remember correctly, the student’s union in UCD (University College Dublin). This is the kind of country I live in.
Graphics were insanely different back then – most PCs had CGA graphics – that meant you had a choice of palettes of 4 colors. i.e. you could only pick the set of colors to use, not the actual colors themselves. Cyan hair. I remember the hair being cyan because there were no alternative colors available.
There was a VGA remake of the game. The graphics were updates, and the colors were changed; but the overall gameplay had never been altered from the original. I went back and played it. It was the same as the game of my youth. The problem was that it didn’t work for me anymore. The jokes were lame, the puns were terrible, most of the comedy was suitable for someone of a younger age than me. I never finished it because I didn’t care enough to finish it.
There was a recent kickstarter that created an ‘Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded’. It tried to update and improve the original game. Characters were added, characters were removed; but ultimately it was trying to bring back the original game. The game has been released and the reviews have been generally negative. I’m one of those that fall onto the negative side. The reason I fall on the negative side is because the game has been lessened by the remake. It didn’t bring back the feelings from the original game (the prurience or the oooh, errr, madam bit of it), and added tat. Pointless rubbish has been added to the game to bring it ‘up to date’. The questions are actually difficult for someone of my age that doesn’t actually watch reality TV, or follow pop culture icons. Once I got past that; the game itself just didn’t feel right. The changes made the game less ‘silly fun’ and more ‘sexist crap’.
Maybe my tastes have changed (and that’s a good change), but I didn’t enjoy the remake anywhere as much as I remember enjoying the original game; which is sad.
A much more cogent analysis of the game can be Foubd on Gamasutra. It is far better at describing the poor decision to have a remake, and also to enunciate the ways it doesn’t work.