Original Release: Vivendi, 2004, PC/PS2/Xbox
This reboot of the Larry series cuts out original designer Al Lowe, makes things a little more GTA-like and focuses on mini-games rather than adventure game puzzles.
Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude (PS2, Vivendi, 2004)
Where to Buy: Steam, GOG, eBay
Review by: Master-B
The Vivendi takeover of Sierra in 2000 was pretty much the end of the beloved Sierra On-Line adventure game company as everyone had known it. That left Vivendi holding a bunch of properties that had all sorts of nostalgic value, but with no interest in doing anything with them in an adventure game market that appeared to have bottomed out.
The occasional oddball tilt at reviving one of the classic Sierra properties would pop up here and there, however, and one of the first was this poke at reviving Leisure Suit Larry in 2004. Vivendi infamously decided to cut creator Al Lowe (who had left Sierra years before) out of the process, and what the two young new writers assigned to the task came up with is basically a video game version of the late 90s-early 2000s frat boy sex romp genre of film: your Van Wilders, your American Pies and so on.
Vivendi seems to have actually spent some money on this, at least in terms of the budget for presentation – the graphics are actually kinda lush by 2004 console standards, and they licensed all sorts of songs for the in-game radios that probably cost a decent amount. And the new dev team were clearly fans of the older games, or at least really did their homework. References to the classics are peppered throughout, and some are pretty obscure. However, you can be a fan of something without really getting it. The main thing that the developers didn’t get here is that everyone hated the intermittent arcade sequences that plagued the older Sierra adventures.
Yep, they excised pretty much all of the adventure game portion and replaced it entirely with arcade sequences. Crummy, low-budget, super-repetitive arcade sequences. Though not the game’s only failing, that’s its biggest by far.
The story takes place some time after the adventures of Larry Laffer, who is now graying and takes a background role as not-so-sage adviser. The new main character is his younger lookalike Larry Lovage, a previously unmentioned nephew (I’m pretty sure it was canon that Larry was an only child, but whatever). This switch-up seems to have been done primarily to get Larry onto a college campus without it seeming too creepy and preposterous.
The overall structure is basically an open world game, and it’s most reminiscent of Rockstar’s Bully (given the school setting with only a small attached town to explore, plus the diversions into various mini-games). To its credit, this game did come out two years before Bully, but the influence of GTA and such are clear.
The gameplay is limited solely to wandering around getting yourself into various mini-games, however. Larry is trying to get himself onto a reality dating show called Swingles that is being filmed on campus, because it promises easy nookie. The Swingles producer keeps tasking him with getting “objects of affection” from various girls about campus to prove his worthiness, which involves seducing them. The seduction process involves just talking to them repeatedly and playing some sort of mini-game each time.
The game leans really heavily on three mini-game types that keep getting repeated over and over: the drinking game “quarters” (bounce a quarter into an empty glass to force the other person to drink), a Parappa-like rhythm game, and a QTE that just involves the four face buttons. There are a small handful of other types of games, but they get introduced later in the story and you don’t see them as often.
The various button-pressing games are mindless and repetitive, but OK. Quarters is a nightmare as you have to simply guess at how the control works, with no visual indicators whatsoever of where your toss is going to end up. I’ve tried flicking the stick the same way each time, and honestly the results just seem to be random.
For such a tiny game world, the load times are ridiculous. Each game area is really small, but each new one (or transition in or out of a mini-game) takes a good 15-20 second load. Every single time.
The mini-games gradually get more difficult and eventually become completely insane towards the end of the game. Fortunately, you can opt to “wimp out” of any game at the cost of several “special tokens” found strewn generously about the game world (you also get a handful for a flawless performance in any mini-game). You stumble across so many special tokens that it’s trivial to simply skip anything that even mildly irritates you.
So what are we actually playing this for, then? Tiddy, apparently. Well, that and the game’s comedy stylings. Unfortunately, neither of these is worth the effort.
Let’s tackle the Tiddy Content first, since that’s the game’s primary selling point. It definitely goes far beyond the original Larry games in terms of explicitness; bare boobies and bums abound, and there are even some brief softcore Showtime-caliber sex scenes. I was actually kind of impressed as this wound up on North American retail shelves in this state; this was a year before Hillary would lose her shit over GTA Hot Coffee, apparently she was just blissfully unaware that this game was out there. With the European version, you even get the full frontal; in the other versions, the Downstairs Bits are covered with a big Censored sign. None of it is what anyone would qualify as “erotic,” however, as it’s basically plasticy Barbie doll bodies with some nipples tacked on over top.
The attempts at comedy here also tend to fall flat. They cycle between being overwritten, mean-spirited, reliant on really crude stereotypes and just plain weird and half-baked (particularly the long conversation mini-games toward the end of the experience, which really sound like the writers were just rolling with whatever popped into their heads and hammering it into place just to ship the game and be done with the whole thing). Criticisms of the old Larry games for being crass and insensitive seem really, really quaint next to this game’s approach. It’s like GTA’s loud cousin with no sense of social awareness, who tries to ape their comedic style but can only manage to get the broadest possible strokes of it.
All this game really did was demonstrate why you need Al Lowe (and a proper adventure game structure) to make Larry work. If you really need to see the early 2000s polygonal lady bits, though, the version to get would appear to be the “Uncut” PC edition which gives you the full European experience.
Links
Walkthrough
Soundtrack
Original print ad
The Women of LSL: Magna Cum Laude
Tilly – Christina Kyriakakis, professional model
Zena – Ally Lane, actress and writer
Luba – Karen Lynn, professional model
Suzi – Tina Melone, former professional model
Zanna – Jamie Quin, former softcore bondage model apparently
Uma – Bria Salvador, professional model?
Barbara Jo – Amy Schleser, last person on Earth with an active Myspace page
Sally Mae – Allison Weder, professional model
Blizarba – Mianda Watts, actress
The rest are uncredited / unknown (yes, that includes Charlotte)
Videos