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The multitalented jazz musician and game designer Al Lowe has provided us with outstanding adventures since Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, and the quality of the series has improved with each successive sequel. Since all the games in the Leisure Suit Larry series center heavily around adult humor, not all gamers have identified well with the series in the past. So it is with some tension that I start up this latest sequel, see the shiny Sierra On-Line logo, and get sucked into its intro...

Larry Laffer, our sly hero and alter ego of Lowe, is still craving for love at the start of his sixth (or fifth) adventure, with no success of romance in sight. This time around, Larry is a last minute replacement for a missing contestant on a dating game show called "Stallions", where he actually wins a prize?a vacation at the infamous La Costa Lotta, a supposedly beautiful health spa. Of course, the luxurious spa is filled with beautiful women?beautiful, single women.

Like all his previous adventures, Larry longs for the companion (or just conversation) with a number of gorgeous ladies. The problem is that each of the 9 women Larry meets has some "problem" which Larry must help solve first. Surely, our wildly charmed Larry does not hesitate before setting off to find the items wanted by these ladies. In the end, Larry finally gets a chance to win the love of a spiritual, former material girl by bringing her 3 items of true romance.
Leisure Suit Larry 6: Shape Up or Slip Out! is a standard point and click adventure. Larry behaves as you expect him to behave. He follows around with every click of the mouse, picks up stuffs, use items, and so on. The interface is simple and neat, using Sierra On-Line's trademark system of icons and hotkeys to allow Larry talk to other characters and interact with his surroundings.

Lowe has done a decent job in designing this game. This sequel holds a certain distinctive atmosphere through a combination of Larry-esque graphics and sounds. The cartoonish characters juxtapose well against the photorealistic backgrounds, and scanned photographic images of clouds, oceans, trees, mountains are combined with the whacked out looks of the buildings. To me, the overall appearance of this game fairs even better than the angular polygon look of 3D models so dominant in today's action/adventure titles

XP + Vista