All Game List

After the joy that was The Secret of Monkey Island, it’s pretty hard for me to get too excited about Altered Destiny. I’ll try to go in with no preconceptions so as to judge the game fairly, but what I know about it doesn’t fill me with confidence. After all, it’s the second game released by Accolade, the company that made the nightmarish Les Manley. It uses the same engine as that travesty, and the majority of the team that worked on Les Manley were also involved in the making of Altered Destiny. Russell Shiffer once again handles the music, and out of the eight people that produced the animation and background art for that awful Elvis inspired Larry rip-off, seven of them came back to work on Altered Destiny (only Mike Nowak avoided it, but then he came back for the Les Manley sequel a year later). The two things that give me some hope that Altered Destiny might be ok are that Michael Berlyn (of Infocom and Tass Times in Tonetown fame) replaced Steve Cartwright as designer of the game, and that a couple of the new background artists previously worked on MechWarrior and Wing Commander (Caitlin and Peter Mitchell-Dayton). The new personnel at least suggest someone was involved that had some decent sci-fi chops.


Ive downloaded a copy that I’ll be running in DOSBox. As usual, I tried loading up the game before I started this post (to grab a screenshot of the title screen). It was a pain to get to run in DBGL, which is the interface I use to run games in DOSBox, but once I followed Glenns Guide to run the game in its own DOSBox installation, I was eventually able to get things going. I suggest following Glens instructions if you want to play along and run into any trouble. I read somewhere that it was difficult to get decent sound in the game, and so far Ive only managed to get PC speaker quality audio. There are a few different options in the setup file, so Ill try a few before giving up. If anyone can assist, there are CAPs to be made! The manual, which I also had to hunt down, is pretty uninteresting, spending the vast majority of space describing how to play a third person parser based adventure game. There is one paragraph at the beginning that gives me some clue as to what I have ahead of me, but since the games introduction covers it perfectly well, Ill withhold giving anything away at this point. I will say that it sounds a bit like Future Wars, albeit with space travel rather than time travel. Are there any companions brave enough to join me on this adventure!? Canageek, you know you really should be loading this one up. You paid for it after all!


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Much time was spent on the creation of said protagonist, with the end result being a 40 year old slightly fat, balding, out of style loser named Larry Laffer. His name was originally going to be Jerry, after one of Al’s friends who regularly visited the office and thought of himself as a fantastic lover, but was changed to Larry so as not to offend the real Jerry. Al then skimmed an encyclopaedia trying to find a suitable surname that began with L, and knew he had the right one as soon as he saw the name Arthur Laffer (an American economist). With that sorted, the duo began work on what would eventually be known as Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. The main challenge that they faced during the development was that Mark was only available for four weeks due to his commitments to Space Quest, and therefore had to work nights and weekends to get the game finished. It took a total of three months to complete, but was delayed until June 1987 while it was beta tested (a first for a Sierra game).