Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude Review

"Don't be frustrated... Your breasts put you at a natural disadvantage"

As you might perhaps suspect, the idea is once again to snare the ladies out of his league and chuckle along at Larry's hapless attempts at doing so. Except this Larry isn't the one that old timers might recall. No. As much as he looks the same, with his enormous head, puny body, annoying nasal whiny voice and terrifyingly bad dress sense, it's actually Larry's young college-age nephew, also - handily - called Larry who has inherited his Uncle's looks (as you'll discover when you meet the old anti-hero hanging out in the grotty streets and strip haunts nearby), and need to be as unsubtle and generally annoying as possible to anyone who crosses his path.

Played out in an action-adventure style, you soon realise there's no actual puzzle-solving whatsoever to hold you up - just a series of fairly mindless, repetitive yet often amusing mini-games to perform in order to gain a series of 'Objects of Affection' which go towards getting you a place on the 'Swingles' dating show that the organisers are currently trying to attract contestants onto from the sexier members of the campus.

Evidently, Larry's not really a suitable candidate at the start; rather like those haplessly deluded Pop Idol contestants that appear utterly convinced that they're the reincarnation of a young Elvis, despite sounding like a pissed off Irish brickie with a throat condition, and looking closer to Shane Richie after an intensive 12-week pie-only diet. You get the picture. The irony of Larry being rude (and generally openly unpleasant) to the plain girls and giving the regular college guys grief is hardly difficult to spot. This is a guy in trouble, and if anything rather than take his penchant for vile philandering and wind-breaking as offensive, it's actually doing the guy a favour to perpetrate his bullshit. The joke's on him, it really is, and makes for a uniquely endearing gaming experience. Somehow. Lord only knows how.

"Is there an airport nearby or is that my cock taking off?"

If you cast even the most cursory of glances at the game, talking to the babes you want to bag inevitably winds up in a mini-game session. Some revolve around conversations, which are as entertaining as they are irritating, involving the rather disturbing premise of guiding a somewhat unresponsive sperm along three 'tracks', with oncoming red and green icons dictating the rise and fall of the interest level of the babe you're trying to woo. Hit too many red fart, belch, leer, or drink icons and you might end up scaring them off with your indiscretions, but hit the required number of green love heart and smily icons and the love heart meter rises and it's onto to the next part of the challenge. As completely oddball as these sections are, the dialogue is genuinely one of the highlights, with Larry rambling his way from one unlikely ruse after another. Often failure is even funnier, and reminds us of the kind of comical conversation trees that were the highlight of adventures gone by.

While the basic button-matching rhythm-action mini-games are hardly worth a mention on their own, the context of some of the scenarios certainly give them a colourful edge, with spanking sessions, a makeover, strip dancing and breast-bouncing strip-trampolining ensuing to make things interesting. It's all very sad, it really is. Sid James would be a happy man.

Elsewhere there's some fairly lame chase n' collect games against the clock, an amusing take on Slaps that lets Larry fake his hit, charge up his whack, while others such as Quarters have our antihero in a coin-lobbing face off, with the Quarter having to land in the glass in order to get your defenceless Philly smashed and in the sack.

Twig suit sex simulator

Or that's the plan, anyhow. As ever, it all goes horribly wrong for Larry in increasingly bizarre ways, with Larry forced to endure being trussed up in a tree costume to turn on a satanic marching band square girl, or watch in hopeful anticipation while a potential lay gets to grips with a strap-on and a teddy bear. At times, it's genuinely surprising how far the filthometer has been pushed, with very little left to the imagination in terms of blowjobs, grunts and groans, hardcore swearing rarely heard in this most sensitive of entertainment arenas, not to mention the proliferation of soft core titillation that's every 12 year old boy's wet dream.

Taken in the spirit intended, though, the game gets away with some of the sadder elements and pointlessly repetitive mini-game sessions by always making the key encounters, conversations and humour such a succession of feel-good moments that you can't help feel compelled to move the story onto the next segment just to find out what befalls this idiot next. As much as you want to be all grown-up and self-righteous about his offensive patter, the dialogue is pushed so far into the realms of ludicrousness you'd have to be feeling exceptionally po-faced not to admire its gall.

Where the game ultimately falls down is its general tendency to repeat itself needlessly. You get the feeling that some of these mini-games are so basic (check out the Pong-inspired games where every successful hit raises Larry's erection until it eventually hits the bell end...) that they must have taken literally minutes to get up and running. Others, such as the constant rhythm action clones, are hardly taxing to develop, and eventually grate - especially when you're forced to replay them several times in order to win a confidence boost, or more cash, for example. If the developers had have treated us to a suite of simple Wario Ware style games as opposed to forcing us to repeat the less fun elements of the game, we'd have felt a good deal more positive about recommending the game.