Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude

We had not expected meeting the love starved Larry Laffer ever again, the main character in a series of late 80s games called Leisure Suit Larry. The man who had flashed his love for polyester suits and bad chat up lines. The last instalment in the series – Love for Sail – came out in 1997 and Larry has stayed clear of the stage since.

The Larry games have always been about one thing: Getting laid – a lot. Unfortunately Larry has never been the most fortunate of guys, not until Love for Sail that is. This lack of good fortune returns in Magna Cum Laude, but there the similarities between the old games and the new one from Vivendi and High Voltage stop.

The Old Boy has retired

Who wouldn't crank up the charm - and the darker one looks alright to!

Larry Laffer is out of the business and his nephew Larry Loveage – a college student with a major in… all his female co students – has taken his place centre stage. He is a born looser, but he discovers that a TV-show called Swingles is visiting campus and the prize is a roll in the hay with one of the gorgeous students.

No more lonely nights in the dorm room with nothing but his right hand to keep him company, it is time to become the most wanted man on campus.

To achieve this you will have to bag some of the sexiest babes around. It's a perfect set-up for another Leisure Suit Larry game and a chance to let a younger generation take over as the old Larry engaged in campus activity of this kind might have seemed creepy.

Magna Cum Laude is all about getting items of affection from the aforementioned babes, items that are procured when the storyline of one of the 20 or so girls in the game is completed, whether or not the outcome was positive for Larry. Initially laying on the charms will be fine, but as the women become more and more demanding, it will become necessary to invest in clothing with appendages to impress them – and some will even require you to pick up the bill, outrageous as this may seem.

As so many times before larry ends up butt-naked.

The marketing campaign of the game has put forward images of an orgy of virtual sex, but when the push comes to shove, the sexual content is not particularly strong. Most of the time Larry has qualms for reasons that would never had bothered the old champion even before clothing hits the floor.

There are nude scenes, but they are short and rarely exiting. Instead the game is awash with swearing – most of the girls have dirtier mouths than fishermen who have spent 50 years at sea, and they will happily repeat those words if you did not hear them the first time.

No more point and click

Challenging the first couple of times - boring the last 50!

Previous games in the series have been adventures, and since the arrival of the mouse we have mainly dealt with point-and-click gameplay structures where the combination of all things (im)possible have been necessary to achieve the goals of the game.

This has been replaced in Magna Cum Laude by a string of smaller subgames, where you will have to be swift on the keys in true 80’s arcade style. An example would be the appearance of four rings on the screen, an arrows appears in one of them and you will then have to hit the correct arrow key before the icon disappears.

The need to find or combine items is simply non-existent, all plot issues are solved by completing these small games.

Come on lads - basically this is how we think!

The most dominant of these games has to do with controlling Larry’s dialogue. You control a sperm cell. If you hit a green face, Larry will say the best possible line of dialogue for the situation, if you hit anything else he will say something negative which will not help him score with the girl in question but most often it will be quite funny. If you hit too many negative items the subgame will be lost and you will have to try again.

In itself this would be a good idea if it was not for the fact that you spend all of your attention on the mini game instead of listening to the mostly very entertaining dialogue – and the fact that the more you fail the funnier it gets is also quite strange. You are almost being rewarded for losing.

The biggest problem in Magna Cum Laude is that these games are repeated endlessly, each of the 17 girls in the game make you play the dialogue game at least three times, which naturally bodes for a repetitive and boring gameplay. It is not as bad with the other subgames, but the level of repetition is simply too high.

The classical drinking game 'Pennies' is there to - but getting drunk in real life still is funnier.

This view of things has apparently also had an impact on the developer because by collecting secret tokens hidden in furniture you will be able to skip the mini games altogether. You will quickly find a bunch of these and if you fail to complete a mini game three times in a row, the difficulty will be significantly reduced.

This does not save us from tediousness, however, since you also need to collect money and self esteem, which you do by – you guessed it – playing mini games identical to the ones in the actual storyline.

Overall Magna Cum Laude will guide you by the hand a lot. Larry has a small black book in which he notes how far he has come with each individual girl, and this lets you now exactly how to proceed in the story. Thus you are never stuck, but would it not be nice to have just a little grey matter working from time to time?

Loading… Loading…

Up and down, Bouncy-Bouncy...

Magna Cum Laude takes place in a 3D universe, perhaps the strongest aspect of the game. The graphics are very cartoon-like with a lot of colour and very nice textures. It's a particularly pretty game in high resolution.

It is also obvious that High Voltage has spent a long time on one particular feature – animating breasts and making them move naturally. The developer has succeeded to a certain extend and one can only wonder why the fruits of this labour are not shown more often.

There are a lot of loadscreens and even more load time. At least there is something nice to look at.

On the other hand, the developer has paid less attention to making the game work smoothly. Every time you move from one area to another there is load time – and since areas are not particularly large this happens often. An area can be run through in about 10 seconds and then there is yet more loading to be done and since you most of the time will have to cross two to three areas to reach your objective this quickly becomes a nuisance.

It's hardly defendable that a PC game which takes up 2.5 GB of hard disk space has to load this often. It might be acceptable to load when a challenge or mini game was started, but the separate areas are so small in the game that the load times are evidence of really poor conversion work. An area will load in 5-20 seconds but apparently it is a matter of minutes in the PS2 version.

Not good enough

The constantly masturbating monkey is the only thing censored in the European version.

The voice artists in Magna Cum Laude do a good job, but the nuggets of gold are few and far in between. Funny episodes do exist – as when Larry sings a heavily modified version of Summer Nights (Tell Me More) from Grease in a gay club with a gay chorus in remembrance of one of his less successful attempts to score.

And there are some hilarious one-liners, but most of the time it is a lukewarm mix of outdated pick up lines and dialogue which tries to be funny, but fails. And again there is too much repetition.

It seems as if High Voltage has not really decided on a fixed target audience for Magna Cum Laude. The old games were aimed at the more mature gamers with a lot of irony and comments below the belt. But all the mini games and lack of brain exercise makes the game a strange mix of nudity, boring dialogue and a repetitive gameplay, making the target audience hard to fathom. The mini games are similar to the ones found in games for kids but the explicit conversations and a couple of sex scenes are aimed at the mature side of the population. It just can't make up its mind who it's for.

Personally, I hope that Vivendi will give Leisure Suit Larry another chance. I understand the attempt to make something new from the series and we will probably be forced to admit that the games of old are just that – outdated. But this attempt at converting a classic to modern times has sadly failed, however that is not saying that it cannot be done.

Good old uncle Larry are thinking up indecent schemes in an indecent bar - we hope to join him in the future.

The reason for the grade not being all bad is the fact that Magna Cum Laude has its moments – and also we miss some innocent entertainment from the pelvic area. I am forced to admit that I have reinstalled some of my old games from the Ultimate Pleasure Pack which contain all the old Larry games, and it is still royally entertaining, even if I have completed them a few times each.

As good old Larry Laffer himself says it by a ragged table in an even more ragged bar:

What ever happened to good old pointing-and-clicking?

Source: Boomtown DK
Translated by: William Bjarnø (Dworkin)