Leisure Suit Larry 6: Shape Up or Slip Out! – Final Rating

By Alex

There is a business axiom I heard somewhere (please don’t ask me for a cite; I’m lazy) that goes something like this: when deciding what product you to give people, you can either give them a gourmet meal (i.e., something they have never seen before and, perhaps, didn’t even know they wanted), or you can give them the best damn hamburger they’ve ever had (i.e., something familiar, but done really, really well (no, that’s not a reference to how long it is cooked for)). Here in Burgerland, aka America, we use hamburger metaphors because that’s our language, bro.

Leisure Suit Larry 6: Shape Up or Slip Out! is a hamburger. It’s not the best damn hamburger on God’s green earth, but it’s certainly a cut above many offerings out there. It’s also an exceedingly stupid game, but that goes with the territory. Nobody plays a Leisure Suit Larry game for erudite conversation, thought-provoking dialogue, or weighty, meaningful themes.

For that, you play Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist.

What Leisure Suit Larry 6 is, is very well-designed. It’s a mite easy for veteran adventure gamers, but the puzzles are mostly logical and make sense. The areas I got frustrated with—the exercise machine belt used to fix the Cellulite Drainage machine and the stupid bottle of water puzzle—are not my fault because I’m borderline psychopathic and cannot accept personal responsibility for anything they are not particularly great puzzles for reasons we’ll get into later.

Leisure Suit Larry 6: Shape Up or Slip Out!: Ultimate Wisdom

by Alex

The Preamble

And so, all good things come to an end. All stupid things, too. Things like Leisure Suit Larry 6: Shape Up or Slip Out! I was stuck after my last post, unable to figure out how to fix the hose on the cellulite drainage machine, so I put out a call to the community and commentor arcanetrivia, nee Lisa H., helped me out with a great clue:

“You have missed a takeable item that might have looked like just an amusing detail the first time you saw it.”

She also clued me in that the game’s various women are all named for wines: Burgundy and Charlotte Donnay (Char Donnay 🡪 chardonnay, get it?) were the only ones I got, but others should’ve been obvious: Shamara Payne/Sham Payne 🡪 champagne, Gammie Boysulay 🡪 gamay Beaujolais, Merrily Lowe/Merr Lowe 🡪 merlot, Rose 🡪 rosé, Shablee 🡪 Chablis, and Thunderbird 🡪 a cheap kind of wine. Only Cavaricchi Vuarnet doesn’t follow this theme, being named for a totally rad line of sunglasses that were really big in the 1980s. I remember all of the older, and therefore totally hot, teenage girls back in the day wearing t-shirts and whatnot with the Vuarnet logo plastered all over them. Whether their sunglasses were actually Vuarnet was beyond me, since I was like seven at the time.

It literally doesn’t get any cooler.

But enough about fashion, let’s get back to arcanetrivia. Such wisdom, such insight, such foresight, such . . . such . . . wis-sight? Anyway, much like Shamara Payne in the game itself, arcanetrivia is also on a quest for inner wisdom, the path of ascension, the ability to transcend this material world and do more than just sit and stare at the ocean all day. Or maybe I am Shamara and she is Larry, providing me with wisdom. As another brilliant sage/juvenile pervert once said, through the voice of Mary in his 1979 rock opera Joe’s Garage:

[I]information is not knowledge
knowledge is not wisdom
wisdom is not truth
truth is not beauty
beauty is not love
love is not music
music is the best!
Wisdom is the domain of the Wizz (which is extinct).
Beauty is a French phonetic corruption of a short cloth neck ornament currently in resurgence.

What this means is: beats the hell out of me. I will just use any excuse to toss a Frank Zappa reference into one of my posts. This preamble has gone on long enough. On with the game!

Leisure Suit Larry 6 - Cracking the Code

by Alex

I’ve done it. After this play session, which had me thinking about ways to inadvertently upset The Adventurers Guild’s moderators and readership how to solve an adventure game’s puzzles long after my sessions ended, I finally understood what Leisure Suit Larry 6 is all about—this:

Leisure Suit Larry 6 - Risqué Business, or (Forced) Sex on the Beach

by Alex

As you can likely tell from the opening image, this post is going to get decidedly non-family friendly. You’ve been warned.

Leisure Suit Larry 6: Marking My Territory

by Alex

I just can’t get away from Jim Walls, no matter how I try.

For some reason, while playing through Leisure Suit Larry 6, I decided to read up on Trickster’s old entries on Sierra’s Jim Walls-designed 1989 classic, Codename: ICEMAN.

Ha ha, “classic.” Calling a frustrating, hateful mess of a game “classic” is just my special brand of sarcastic humor designed to make you laugh by calling something the clear opposite of what it is. Classic me!

Ha ha! Dropping in a new game mechanic that punishes the player for using the game’s save and restore function without any sort of warning, thereby preventing them from getting a key item that will help later on. Classic Jim Walls!

Leisure Suit Larry 6: Shape Up or Slip Out! (1993): Introduction

by Alex

Al Lowe.

Jim Walls.

Jim Walls.

Al Lowe.

Al Lowe

Jim Walls

Al Walls.

Jim . . . Lowe?

These two men and their games loom large in my time here as a blogger for The Adventurers Guild. Of the 11 titles I’ve reviewed since 2015— Leisure Suit Larry 1: Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (VGA Remake), Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patty Does A Little Undercover Work, Police Quest III: The Kindred, Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood, Robin of Sherwood: The Touchstones of Rhiannon, Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel (VGA Remake), Lure of the Temptress, L.A. Law: The Computer Game, Quest for Glory III: Wages of War, Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist, and Blue Force—a whopping six, or 55 percent, have been designed by either Al Lowe (Larry 1, Larry 5, Freddy Pharkas) or Jim Walls (Police Quest 1, Police Quest 3, Blue Force). If my math is correct (dubious), that’s over half. Of the remaining five, two have been about Robin Hood, one has been a Quest for Glory game, and two have been garbage. Ah well. They can’t all be winners.

(I did get to interview Conquests of the Longbow designer and all-around legend Christy Marx, which was really cool, but interviews don’t count as reviews.)

The point is, with Larry 6, my total of Al Lowe or Jim Walls games reviewed for this site is up to 7 out of 12, bringing that total up to 58 percent. I swear, when I signed up for this blog, I did not expect to play cop games or immature sex games. It just . . . sort of happened.