Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude for Xbox Reviews by Gamers

Among those of us old enough to have played it, the Leisure Suit Larry series has been a real cherished memory. The well-loved adventure series stood out thanks to fantastic humor and "adult situations." Now, to the delight of kids over 17 everywhere (especially those whose parents don't have Cinemax), Vivendi and High Voltage have brought the series back in Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude.

Rather than focusing on the further adventures of Larry Laffer, the new game follows the exploits of his nephew, Larry Lovage. A new dating show has just come to the younger Larry's college and he's anxious to get on it. To do so, he'll have to try to get into the pants of nearly every lady on the campus. Along the way, he'll have to work in a gay bar, drink lots of alcohol, hustle some whores, drink a little cough syrup, and try not to get caught peeing in the quad.

In short, this game is so much like my own college life that I'm considering suing the designers.

In addition to meeting big-headed Larry, you'll also encounter the usual suspects of any teen sex romp film: the ditzy cheerleader, the rebellious rocker chick, the cold science major, the awkward exchange student, the business-like sorority leader, and many more. It's worth noting that High Voltage adds a unique twist to each of the characters that make them seem (a little) less like tired stereotypes. The countrified cowgirl is also Jewish, for example, while the black-clad, Euro-style hipster is, well, I don't want to spoil all the fun.

Gameplay
It seems that the game designers have managed to spoil much of it all on their own. You can thank this game for accelerating the decline of the intelligent gamer. From the opening sequence to the final credits, everything is much too clear and too obvious here. Rather than the classic, thinking-pervert's gameplay that we remember so fondly from the original game, High Voltage has decided to focus almost exclusively on repetitive mini-games of hand-eye coordination, meaning you can safely leave your brain out of the game altogether.

It's not that I want to click on every single object in the environment or spend an hour trying to puzzle out the syntax of a particularly obscure trigger; that type of trail-and-error game mechanic was frustrating even back then. But there's simply no exploration or puzzle solving here. Given the Larry brand, I expected this game to challenge to something other than my reflexes. At every stage of the game you're told who to talk to next and where to find them. This makes you feel more like a voyeur than an active participant. Sure, there are some secrets to discover here but they're all completely incidental to completing the game.

Much of the gameplay involves steering a small, smiling sperm cell around various scrolling obstacles. You're trying to build up a heart meter and keep it full until the conversation's end. If you hit a belch, you lose some heart. If you hit a camera, you lose heart as well but you're compensated with a close-up of the girl's breasts. Cocktails and beers also float by and, if you hit them, you'll become drunker and have a greater delay in moving the sperm guy around. You can sober up a bit by hitting a coffee cup.

It's fun to hit some of the bad spots now and then just to hear the hilarious things that Larry says but, though the content changes, the overall outcome of each successful conversation is exactly the same. They're all either pass/fail and don't allow you to develop any kind of variety in your relationships.

You'll also frequently be called on to play basic rhythm games like those found in Parappa the Rappa or Space Channel 5. Whether you're painting a picture of a model, mixing drinks at a bar, or participating in a game of follow the leader on the dance floor or trampoline, you'll have to follow and repeat a sequence of directional inputs. In some cases, you'll be given a sequence that you have to repeat in time. When you're dancing the correct inputs scroll across the screen and you'll have to hit the right button as each icon passes through a small ring. Other times you'll see the icons pop up one at a time and you'll have to hit the corresponding button before it disappears.

Every once in a while the game will also require you to take pictures of girls with your camera. The basic premise is pretty straightforward here. All you'll need to do is just point the camera at the girl in question and wait for her to strike a pose. Five bubbles at the top of the screen fill in to show you just how great the picture is. Rather than asking you to pick particularly sexy angles to get the best pictures, the quality of the pictures will be determined by how far you're zoomed in. Given the extreme zoom feature, it would have been great if you had been asked to take pictures surreptitiously.

Though there are a variety of other mini-games here, most are too simple. When you play quarters, you'll simply moving the analog stick and down in a straight line to make your pitch. Games that involve feeding lab monkeys or passing out animal rights flyers follow the familiar Tapper system. The wet T-shirt game is probably the sorriest of the lot. All you have to do there is wait for a girl to stop in front of you and then shoot her with the squirt gun. Interactive it might be; interesting it ain't.

These systems are fairly easy early on but the Whack-a-mole and conversation challenges become increasingly difficult and repetitive as the game goes on. Failing a challenge merely drops Larry's confidence but this is easy enough to build up again once you've passed the first challenge in the game. (You need a minimum level of confidence to talk to certain girls in the game.) If a challenge proves too tough for you, the game will relax the difficulty a bit and even give you option to pay a penalty in coins to advance anyway. So unless you're completely uncoordinated, this shouldn't even be an issue.

The real issue is dealing with the aggravation inherent in the premise. As Larry gets frustrated at his inability to hook up with any of these girls without something going horribly (and occasionally hilariously) wrong, it's hard for the player not to become frustrated as well. The game seems to constantly building to a climax that it never really intends to deliver. Since the whole title is about Larry trying to hook up with the various female students at the university, it's hard for the player not to share his impatience when the inevitable complications postpone his sexcapades.

What little real sex is in the game is never really shown and the nudity in the game is restricted to butts and breasts. A large "Censored" bar covers the really naughty bits when characters get completely naked. We understand that the European version of the game will at least show full nudity, even if it still edits out the sex.

While I can justify the publisher's reluctance to release an Adults Only version here in the States, it seems to have no qualms about including lots and lots of vulgar dialogue. While this isn't the place to go on a tirade about ratings it's interesting that as an M-rated game, Larry is free to introduce sexual situations and talk in great detail about them but is prohibited from ever actually showing them.

The real saving grace for the game is that, from start to finish, the dialogue is just hilarious. More than a few times the game throws a line at you that'll have you laughing harder than you have in a long time. Larry's inner monologue during his date with Bilzarbra is simply one of the funniest things I've heard in a game. Some lines even comment on the game itself or the gaming industry in general. Larry's out-of-character conversation with the game makers is very witty, as is the belligerent videogame machine who gets offended when Larry mentions how much people hate side-scrollers. The delivery and writing are fantastic almost all the way through and you're sure to have more than a few favorite lines.

One girl complains, "I miss having sex in public. My last boyfriend was such a prude...and his sister was even worse." Late in the game Larry approaches a sexy computer games nerd, but she retreats a bit, saying, "I don't know if I can hang out with someone I only know in real life. Shouldn't we IM or MMORPG for a while?" Larry's got some great lines himself, ranging from, "Oh, man! You smell like herpes," to "Is this what passes for a VIP room in this town? More like VI pee-pee." The game is chockfull of these types of comments.

The only real problem with the humor here is that much of it plays out during the sperm-swimming dialogue sequences and you can find yourself paying much more attention to navigating through the bar at the bottom than to the content of the conversations. This sort of weakness also applies to the rhythm sequences. The animators and artists have done a great job with the visuals here but you won't be able to appreciate them fully because you're so focused on trying to follow the sequence of button presses.

It's more of a shame because the graphics are good here. It's decidedly difficult to make polygonal characters sexy and the artists for Leisure Suit Larry have succeeded admirably. The inclusion of Luba in a recent issue of Playboy should be proof enough of that. To be honest, there's still something just a little bit creepy about being turned on by a video game character, but this game is definitely making it seem less strange.

Graphics
Outside of the girls the rest of the game looks pretty good. The environments are quite colorful and loaded with detail. The DIO frat house and the mini mart are both crammed full of stuff to look at. The mini mart's porno aisle even has an entire area devoted to Lou Diamond Phillips. These little touches are really clever and help bring the game world to life. You can see from the screenshots that the actually geometry is pretty blocky and the textures could be increased in resolution a bit but, when you consider how well the girls are rendered and the cool little jokes that are sprinkled here and there, you don't mind so much.

Sound
The sound in the game is also impressive. There's such a broad range of characters among the voice actors that you'll find yourself really getting to know these people. The music also fits the subject beautifully. While you might not be particularly surprised to hear that a game about college life includes tunes like "I'm Too Sexy" or "Girls, Girls, Girls," at least that stupid Tub-thumping song isn't here.

For some reason there are certain cutscenes that play out in terrible quality. I only saw a handful of them during the entire game but the video quality is poor and the sound is barely audible. They're rare enough not to bother me too much but they definitely weaken the game's presentation.

Even with seeking out all the secrets, you can be done with this one in about 12 hours or so. You can go back and replay any of the challenges you've completed, sometimes earning more coins and money to unlock some of the game's bonuses. There are three different endings for the game but no way to obtain all three without quitting and reloading before you make your final decisions about which girl to end with.

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