Leisure Suit Larry 7: Love for Sail!

Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail! is a 1996 video game, part of the Leisure Suit Larry series. It was the last LSL game written by series creator Al Lowe, and the last (to date) to feature original protagonist Larry Laffer as the main character.

Despite being known as Leisure Suit Larry 7 during its development, Love for Sail! was actually the sixth instalment in the LSL series due to the (apparently intentional) non-existence of a fourth game. Although the number is not part of the game's official title, the cover does feature a subtle numeral "7" in the artwork (notice where the shark's fin appears to meet the black area of the ship).

After many of the LSL games had gained a reputation for not actually featuring all that much raunchy content when analysed, Love for Sail! included some much more risqué elements compared to previous instalments. It also featured more fleshed-out, cartoon style graphics than its predecessors, as well as full voice acting.

This was the first LSL game to receive an ESRB rating (Mature) upon its original release.

Plot
Love for Sail! was the first Larry game since the third to pick up immediately where its predecessor left off; typically, it features Larry getting dumped by the woman who represented the ultimate goal of Larry 6, Shamara.

The formula was much the same as the previous games: the "twist" was that Larry was a passenger on a cruise ship populated by parodies of famous people. Among the other cruise guests were "Drew Baringmore" (Drew Barrymore), "Dewmi Moore" (Demi Moore), "Victorian Principles" (Victoria Principal), "Jamie Lee Coitus" (Jamie Lee Curtis), "Nailmi" and "Wydoncha Jugg" (Naomi and Wynonna Judd) and "Annette Boning" (Annette Bening). Various other pop icons were parodied in the background, such as the Archie Comics gang playing nude volleyball, various incarnations of James Bond in the ship's casino (itself an homage to Peter Sellers's famous Casino Royale parody), a Sierra staffer dressed as Sailor Moon, and porn icon Ron Jeremy walking around naked. Most of the male supporting cast (Peter the Purser, Johnson the bartender, Dick the guardrobe attendant, Wang the galley server, Bob Bitt the artist) are named after popular euphemisms for the male reproductive organ or are in some way related to it (Bob Bitt, for instance, is named after John Wayne Bobbitt; the character also shares the same first name and bears a passing resemblance to fellow artist Bob Ross).

The plot revolves around Larry's attempt at winning a weekly contest held on the ship by Captain Thygh, a gorgeous blonde. The contest involves a series of other games varying from legitimate sports competitions like bowling to naughtier things like a machine created to test one's sexual prowess. Each passenger is given a score card with a selection of the various competitions to compete in, and the passenger with the highest cumulative score at the end of the week wins. The prize is an additional free week on the cruise spent sharing the Captain's cabin (and, presumably, her bed.)

The player must come up with a variety of ways to cheat in each of Larry's assigned competitions so that he can get the highest score and win the contest. Among Larry's chosen competitions are a cooking contest, a "best dressed" contest, a game of horseshoes, bowling, the sexual prowess contest and others. At times Larry wins these contests not by cheating but only by an unexpected twist of fate triggered by his (often unintentional) actions. For instance, Larry's encounter with fashion designer Jamie Lee Coitus causes his Leisure Suit to become the height of fashion; as such he wins the best dressed competition. Similar to Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work, it is impossible for Larry to be killed, or for the game to be placed in an "unwinnable" state, by a bad decision.

It was also the first Larry game to include a full-fledged minigame (not counting the casino games in the earlier installments, which were essential to the plot): by collecting hidden red-and-white-striped dildos (Where's Dildo?, a pun on Where's Waldo?), the player could unlock high quality pin-up desktop wallpapers of the ladies in the game (the images are simply Windows BMP files stored in the Drivers subdirectory of the game under misleading Memory1.drv ... Memory8.drv names; they can be opened with any graphics program).

Development
Players could also "appear" in the game by placing voice samples of selected dialogue and a digitized photo in a particular directory (the default was Al Lowe). Due to time constraints, the information to do so was not printed in the manual, but was published only some time later in an on-line announcement.

Love for Sail! also provided a more-literal-than-usual interpretation of Easter eggs: when certain obscure actions were performed, a small icon resembling an Easter egg flashed in a corner of the screen. This usually indicated that a "seduction" scene could now be played featuring nudity that was normally obscured.

Due to the lack of documentation, and the obscurity of the totally unguessable easter eggs, all these were possible only after following the hints released by the Sierra website, several months after the release of the game.

The game also shipped with a "CyberSniff 2000", a sheet of numbered scratch-and-sniff paper, corresponding to a number displayed on the screen at a certain location, so that the player could get a scent of what the area the player was in smelled like.

Reception
It received mostly positive reviews.