"Gee, Larry; looks like things are just the way they used to be. You thought your life was complete: You had found true love with a beautiful woman, with a beautiful car and a beautiful home, all in beautiful Los Angeles... but instead, you're out on the streets again! What will you do?"
— The Narrator
Leisure Suit Larry 2: Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places) is a video game programmed by Al Lowe and published by Sierra in 1988. It's the second installment in the Leisure Suit Larry series.
After the events of the last game, Larry Laffer follows Eve back to her place in Los Angeles. Eve, however, immediately throws him out, leaving a distraught Larry on his own in the City of Angels. Along the way, he wins the lottery, lands himself on a dating game with a free cruise trip as a prize, after which he ends up on Nontoonyt Island ruled by the evil Dr. Nonookee, all while he's on the run from the KGB, who are looking for a vital piece of information hidden in an onklunk that has fallen under Larry's possession.
Larry 2 is somewhat infamous for having less sexual content than the previous game, at Sierra's request. This resulted in the game playing out more like a standard Sierra adventure game with a more linear plot, completely going against the more free-roaming nature of the first game.
The game runs on the SCI 0 engine. Larry's movements are controlled with the arrow keys and commands must be typed into a text parser. Graphics are slightly updated from its predecessor, featuring slightly more detailed EGA sprites and occasional displays of Larry's expressions, though the very detailed pictures of women are made way smaller. The game also has a "Trite Phrase" feature allowing the player to set a phrase characters will often say, by default, it's "Have a nice day."
Video Examples for this article.
This game provides examples of:
- 555: This game's Copy Protection involves typing in a 555 number depending on which picture of a woman shows up. There are numbers that work in every case, though.
- Abhorrent Admirer: Larry finds all women sexy. But he makes an exception for Bachelorette Barbara's mother, who has pursued after him onto the cruise ship after she saw him on TV. Even the Non-Standard Game Over screen warns you've got to get off this liner before nightfall before it's too late.
- 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.
- Adjustable Censorship: This is the only Larry game in which you can freely adjust the Filth-O-Meter, but the only thing it changes is the vulgarity of some lines.
- Affably Evil: The in-game version of Ken Williams that Larry meets in the plane is quite friendly, engaging in a conversation with Larry about his latest job before scalping him. Even then, he doesn't seem to do it out of actual malice to our hero.
- Alliterative Name: Barbara Bimbo and Biff Barf.
- Alliterative Title: Leisure Suit Larry 2: Looking For Love (in Several Wrong Places).
- Ambiguous Syntax: Valley Girl Barbra Bimbo is asked if she's ready, and says "Yes, and I've made my decision, you know, too." The announcer thinks she means she picked bachelor two, Larry, but she was actually going to pick number three.
- 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.
- Arc Words: The Trite Phrase, which you can set to whatever you like (by default it's "Have a nice day.") and characters will state it over a dozen times throught the game.
- Asleep in Class: Larry has slept through Spanish classes back in high school.
- Artifact of Doom: The onklunk. Once you get it, everyone wants you dead. Seriously.
- Attractive Bent-Gender: Larry just needs to remove his body hair, have long blonde hair and wear a bikini with a stuffed top to pass as an attractive woman near KGB agents, although he is not so lucky at the airport. Oddly enough, one of the things you can stuff your top with is a handful of bars of hotel soap. One would think that would make for a distinctly misshapen bosom…
- Barbie Doll Anatomy: Averted on Nontoonyt Island, where you do see (from a distance) the nipples of many topless women. The crude graphics make them little more than darker dots, though.
- Bee Afraid: If Larry brushes a bush of bees in Nontoonyt Island, they take him away with their incredible strength to their queen to be her love slave, resulting in a game over.
- Blunt "Yes": When Larry decides to crawl under chains on the ship, he wonders whether he isn't hundreds of miles from shore. The narrator responds with "Yes!" and then it's game over.
- Burp of Finality: When Larry is eaten by an anaconda, the snake finishes with a burp.
- The Cameo:
- Rosella appears as a hairdresser, who isn't too happy to find someone with blonder hair than her. She even takes the time out to plug King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella.
- Ken and Roberta Williams, founders of Sierra, are among the guests at the restaurant.
- Catching Some Z's: When Larry sleeps on the U.S.S. Love Tub, z letters come out of his mouth.
- Changing Clothes Is a Free Action: When Larry meets a naked woman on the beach and she invites him to go somewhere, when she starts moving, she's instantly wearing a dress.
- Clothing Damage: Subverted. Larry spends two weeks at sea in a lifeboat and is shipwrecked on a beach. When he steps on the beach, his suit looks terrible... until he dusts it off and it looks like new. He later gets covered in ash after a bomb explodes next to him, and he dusts himself off and is good as new.Don't you just love a good polyester?
- Confetti Drop: Just as Larry is about to enter U.S.S. Love Tub, confetti starts dropping from above the ship. Looking at it makes the narrator exclaim "Ain't it pretty!"
- Consolation Prize: The losers of show-within-a-game "The Dating Connection" received one year's supply of armadillo polish, twenty cases of black shoelaces, and, of course, a copy of the Home Game.
- Copy Protection: You have to start the game by typing in a woman's number based on her photo in the instruction manual. Or you could just use 555-larry, 555-cheat, or 555-0724 to bypass it no matter which picture pops up.
- Debug Room: You can access an extensive debug mode if you use 555-0724 as the number at the beginning, letting you get all the items, visit all rooms, check position, and more. The list of available commands is accessible when you type in "Help". The game thinks you're Al Lowe during this.
- Dominatrix: Big Mama has a thing for whips, chains, black underwear, and Larry. Larry doesn't have a thing for her, but she doesn't mind that.
- Double Entendre: You must pick the padlock holding an airplane door shut (don't ask) and the narrator states that "You feel yourself being sucked." The next line? "Out, unfortunately!"
- Edge Gravity: Astonishingly present, where otherwise there are a lot of things that can kill you. You even get points for almost falling off the cliff, though they get taken away immediately afterwards.
- Exact Words: A beautiful blonde tells Larry, "Why don't you come back to my place, and you won't have to hang around alone ever again!" Because he'll be dead.
- Fan Remake: Someone made a point-and-click remake of this game for Windows, which you can find here
. It has some musical changes, but as a whole feels like what you'd expect from VGA games, while being pixel-perfect to the original EGA version. Some puzzles get tricky without a parser, while the infamous barf bag and hair rejuvenator quirk is completely gone. It even fixes Polyester Patti by making her a brunette, though it still spells her name as Patty for some reason. - Fountain of Youth: A reward Larry receives from the Witch Doctor in the game's ending, restoring his hair to full and making him look handsome again.
- 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.
- Gosh Dang It to Heck!: Setting a low filth level often censors vulgar language, for example "The hell you say!" is replaced with "The heck you say!" Though one line takes the cake - once Larry gets tired with questioning about the airplane ticket, he shouts "JUST GIVE ME THE GOL-DARNED, DAB-NATTED, GOLLY-GEE-WHIZ-BANGED TICKET!!" on the lower filth levels.
- Groin Attack: After Larry gets seduced by one of Dr. Nonookee's henchwomen, 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 henchwomen, 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!"
- Just Eat Gilligan: Most of the plot of the game is driven by how Larry has inadvertently acquired a microfilm inside a rare Peruvian Onklunk. While it could be argued that Larry doesn't have any particular reason to ditch the instrument, the player may get frustrated that all these random characters are trying to kill him for a useless item that, in the end, just gets ditched in a jungle without any player input.
- Lethal Chef: Two of them — one EVIL rat bastard in the resort restaurant who will serve Larry deadly food on a tray table; and another in the airport restaurant, serving Larry the deadly "Blue Pate" special. (The latter has gross crap inside it including a bobby pin; Larry will have to search the "Blue Pate" and extract the pin out.)
- 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.
- My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels: Larry brings out his half-remembered Spanish to try to woo a Spanish-speaking woman, but fails. Instead, he succeeds in obtaining a stolen microfiche from a Soviet spy without realizing it, because the spy mistakes him for an Identical Stranger and his comically awful Spanish for the sign and countersign required to retrieve it.
- My Sister Is Off-Limits: Attempting to screw the maid results in her brother Carlos coming into the room displeased with Larry and shooting him to death.
- National Geographic Nudity: Nontoonyt Island has many topless girls, and upon meeting Kalalau there, Larry could only go, "SHE'S TOPLESS!!!" Funnily enough, in the end when Larry removes the brainwashing effect of Dr. Nonookee from several hypnotized native girls, they respond by tearing off their tops!
- No Kill like Overkill: The "helicopter girls" will not only slice Larry in half, but toss his parts into a vat of hydrofluoric acid.
- Obfuscating Stupidity: One guy on the street pretends to be some stupid drunk, but is actually a KGB agent who can give Larry something that makes him collapse.
- Oh, Crap!: The woman who gives the onklunk to Larry gets a sudden realisation when it turns out she didn't give it to the right guy.
- Ominous Fog: The dense fog on Nontoonyt Island that appears and dissipates rather rapidly is a smokescreen for Dr. Nonookee's evil schemes.
- One-Steve Limit: Averted for Ken (on the airplane) and Chief Ken (Keeneewauwau) on Nontoonyt Island. They do sorta look the same (both were derived from Sierra president Ken Williams), but have different personalities. Ken on Nontoonyt will help you and you get to marry his daughter, but Ken on the plane will, like nearly everyone else on the planet, KILL you, specifically with his hair transplant schemenote .
- Overly Long Gag: The scene where Larry finds himself lost in a jungle (you go through this every time you come there)note , and the seating scene:"Why, Mr. and Mrs. Rich/Famous/Gates/Leach/Williams," says the Maitre d'. "What a pleasure to see you again. Of course I have a table for you!"
"Please, walk this way."
Well, that was certainly rude! You were here before them. You feel yourself becoming perturbed/annoyed/indignant/incensed/enraged!
"I hope you find this satisfactory, Sir," grovels the Maitre d' with his palm extended. - Painful Body Waxing: Larry has to get rid of all his body hair to convincingly pass as a woman. To accomplish this, a friendly hairdresser promptly encases him in what can only be described as a cocoon of body wax. When he then pulls the wax off, Larry is in such pain that he leaps straight towards the ceiling.
- Paper-Thin Disguise: Flat-out subverted. You need a perfect disguise at the beach to fool the KGB there. If not, they will mock you as they capture you ("Only in Russia do women wear leisure suits to the beach!", etc.). And even then, it doesn't work once you reach the airport — the guards there think you are a cross-dresser and let's just say that YOU ARE DEAD.
- 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.
- Point of No Return: The game is essentially split into six areas and if you don't get everything from one before proceeding, you're screwed as you can't go back there.
- Press X to Die:
- Typing "give onklunk" any time you have the onklunk, which means that the precious onklunk containing the secret info either ends in the hands of Doctor Nonookee or in those of KGB. You traitor!
- Type "cheat." "Ok, you win.TM (Game over.} The game then exits to DOS.
- Reduced to Dust: If Larry doesn't have the Gigantic Gulp by day 6 of his travel on the lifeboat, he'll literally turn to dust from thirst.
- Relocating the Explosion: Larry steals a random suitcase that turns out to be a bomb. He tries to take it out of the airport, but it explodes near the ticket counter, however it's a comically small explosion he dismisses as a firecracker.
- Running Gag: Among others: "Don't all barber shops look alike?" and "But then, you find any kind of woman sexy". You can also create your own due to the "Trite Phrase" feature.
- Sequel Hook: In the game's ending, Patti states you should watch for her in Leisure Suit Larry III, and the narrator asks if there's a market for Polyester Patty in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals?
- 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.
- Show Within a Show: There are two in-universe game shows: The Dating Connection and Lucky Life, both of which Larry wins and gets prizes from (a cruise with Barbara Bimbo and $1,000,000 per year), though he also ends up losing them ultimately making his participation pointless (Barbara's mother goes with Larry instead, Larry jumps ship and the lottery goes bankrupt).
- Sliding Scale of Linearity vs. Openness: A 1 on the scale. Possibly the most linear Larry game, you have to do just about everything in the necessary order to progress, earlier areas often can't be returned to, and there's no real exploration whatsoever.
- Spanner in the Works: So much. Of the unaware variety. Seriously, Larry ends up screwing Nonookee's plot without ever being aware of it, and to add insult to injury, kill him by accident.
- Spy Speak: Larry's My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels Spanish pickup lines accidentally complete the sign-countersign for a KGB agent to give him a microfilm.
- 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."
- Take a Third Option: Larry at the airport responds to the question "Kosher or Mexican?" with "Armenian!"
- Take Our Word for It: Attempting to look at the woman who serves the "Blue Pate" special at the airport results in the narrator telling you "Nah. You'd rather not. (Trust me on this one!)" Considering how previously looking at an ugly woman (Mama Bimbo in her cabin) still resulted in her being shown despite the narrator's reluctance, it's likely that the airport lady is an abomination of some kind.
- That Cloud Looks Like...: The room right before the volcano has a cloud that's shaped very much like a woman. Looking at results in the narrator telling you that it's just a cloud and asking if you thought you can see something.
- This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: Larry, a computer programmer, must prove his worth to the people of Noontonyt by mastering the mighty peesea (a computer) and write a short program.
- Timed Mission: Probably the most instances in a Larry game, though it doesn't cover the entire game like the predecessor.
- After winning The Dating Connection and getting the ticket for the U.S.S. Love Tub, Larry must do whatever he needs to in L.A. before the boat leaves the port.
- On the U.S.S. Love Tub, Larry has to escape before night falls and he returns to his cabin and Mama Bimbo gets him.
- When Larry buys the ticket for Aerodork Airlines, he has to get to Gate #1 before he misses the plane.
- When Larry actually gets on the plane and distracts Ken, he must open the door and fall out of the plane, otherwise he'll get caught by the KGB for the last time.
- Trial-and-Error Gameplay: This is probably the Larry game that has the most of it. The biggest example has to be when Larry orders a "Blue Pate" special at the airport, then as he attempts to eat it, it turns out there is a bobby pin in it which kills him, even though you can't know about it beforehand. You have to take the pin out of the food, and the game really points it out that you wouldn't get past this part on your first try, as evidenced by lines when you look at the pin or talk to the woman again afterwards.
- Tuckerization: The contestants and bachelorette of the show-within-a-game "The Dating Connection" were named after the beta testers that helped Al Lowe debug the game.
- Unintentionally Unwinnable: 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.
- Winged Soul Flies Off at Death: After Dr. Nonookee is crushed by the piano, he appears as a floating angel, playing the harp and slowly ascending to Heaven... before a flaming hand appears out of nowhere to snatch him where he belongs.
- 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.
