Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude

Leisure Suit Larry was the original adult themed adventure game and now more than ten years after the original appeared on PCs, the series comes to Xbox. The whole point behind the game is help our hero Larry Loveage score with the ladies of his college. As such, the game is filled with very adult humor and situations and there is some polygonal T & A (but nothing bad). This game is rated “M” for Mature and is definitely not for kids.

Dating 101

So the whole point is to try and help Larry score with the ladies and the way you do that is through a series of minigames. You walk around the college campus and eventually around town trying to find girls to talk to. The girls range from spastic cheerleaders, the geek turned hottie, a marching band chick, and many more. They are all sterotypes, and bad ones at that, but that doesn’t really matter. The way you try to woo them is by doing things such as talking with them, playing quarters, jumping on a trampoline, and dancing among other things. When Larry is talking to them, you can direct the conversation by steering a little sperm icon through good and bad talking points. The more good things you say, the more the girl will like you. If you go through bad points, she won’t like you as much. The other activities are mostly made up of Dance Dance Revolution timing sequences. A button or direction flashes on the screen and you have to press it at the right moment in order to mix drinks or dance. Again, the better you do, the more the girl will like you. Alcohol plays a large part in the game and as Larry gets intoxicated the minigames become more difficult.

(mini)Gameplay

And that is basically it. You literally do nothing but move from simple minigame to simple minigame in one sad attempt to impress a girl after another. You meet a lot of funny characters and experience a lot of clichéd college antics, but the gameplay is just too simple and stupid to really be anything but repetitive. The mission structure also limits how enjoyable the game is because you are constantly on fetch quests or trying to collect money. Money is really quite hard to come by, but it is required for many of the missions so the stories you are following with the girls grind to a halt as you collect money through yet more stupid minigames. Something else that completely destroys the pace of the game is that there are long load times all over the place. Every time you enter a new area the game has to load for 20-30 seconds so you spend most of your time with the game waiting for it to load instead of playing.

Healing the World With Laughter

There is a redeeming factor in Magna Cum Laude, though, and that is just how amazingly hilarious the whole experience is. Some of the jokes are raunchy and vulgar, but most of the best bits in the game are where it is just off the wall goofy. Obscure references to pop culture abound. The jokes are so rapid-fire, though, that for every couple you miss there will be four or five that have you laughing out loud. The conversations Larry has with the girls are also extremely funny. When you pass through the good talking points the things Larry says to impress a girl are pretty humorous, but when you hit one of the bad points the things Larry says are just insanely funny. If you like movies such as Road Trip or American Pie and its sequels, you’ll find Magna Cum Laude to be hilarious. The humor is very similar, but MCL is even more off the wall and the referential jokes are fun because not everyone will get them. If you are in college currently or have been to college any time in the last 15-20 years you will also likely find MCL to be very funny because its version of college life and dating is actually fairly accurate. As much as we’d all like to deny it, this will be familiar territory and that makes it doubly funny.

Graphics, Sound, and Bottom Line

The graphics and sound in Magna Cum Laude are actually pretty well done. The environments are filled with visual jokes and they look great and do a good job with the whole college vibe. The characters are detailed yet still cartoony and they look great. The sound is also well done and the hours and hours of voicework in the game sound wonderful.

In the end, though, Magna Cum Laude is a hard game to recommend. It is really funny and trying to get all of the girls to like Larry is actually pretty fun. Larry is rather likeable and you want him to succeed. All of the simple, repetitive minigames and long load times ruin the experience. When you have to weigh all of the boring crap against the humor, the humor just can’t measure up because you can get the same jokes in a dozen other places these days. It also has to be noted that at first, the game is interesting and talking to the girls is pretty fun. But after a while, you can’t help but think that your time would be better spent out in the real world actually talking to real women. This concept suffers from the fact that the real thing is a whole lot more exciting than playing some videogame. It is a fun experience but it definitely isn’t worth buying. Rent it.