The Official Book of Leisure Suit Larry - Compute! Books, œ14.95

Written by Ralph Roberts and Al Lowe, with a certain amount of
"help" from Larry Laffer himself, The Official Book of LSL is a
228 page, soft cover book which covers the complete series of
Larry games.

The first chapter is an introduction to the book, looking at
Larry's early life and how it all changed when his mother decided
she had a life of her own to lead, sold their house, moved to
Florida and left Larry out in the cold. This sudden upheaval was
responsible for Larry changing from a nerd into the womanizer we
now know so well.

The next few chapters cover the idea behind the character of
Larry, the humour and style of the games, their construction and
design, the graphics - both animated and background, SCI (Sierra's
Creative Interpreter) which is their specially developed language,
the history of Sierra On-Line, the range of computers the games

are available for (and their own pros and cons), and interviews
with Larry and some of his women.

There is a lot of added information through these sections which
explains many of the aspects of the games that we might not have
considered. For there are a large number of in-jokes programmed
into them, either in the text or the graphics - for instance, do
you know who the man in the barrel selling apples in Larry 1 is?
Or why Larry 1 was an open game whereas Larry 2 was more linear?
Or why there's a limit of $250 to the amount that can be won in
the slot machine?

The second half of the book is given over to solutions to the
series of games, starting off with some general hints and leading
on to walk-throughs and maps of each game plus lists of possible
points. The walk-throughs are written in the form of conversations
between Al Lowe and Larry. Finally, there's a short quiz to test
your knowledge of the games - and to see how closely you've paid
attention to the book!

All in all, the book will be of interest to those people who
enjoyed the games or have got stuck in them and anyone who, like
me, is interested in the little details of adventure games which
help to bring them to life. It's a mite expensive at almost œ15
but then the games aren't cheap either. It's amusing if you like
the Larry humour but the style is rather self-indulgent with Larry
constantly interrupting his creator, Al Lowe, as he tells his
tales.

Oh yes .... for those who like me didn't know the answers to the
questions posed earlier, the man in the barrel is Steve Wozniak of
Apple computers, Larry 2 was made more linear to reduce the amount
of disk swapping and the $250 dollar limit is because 255 is the
largest number available in a one-byte variable.

                                              Sue