Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude

Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude

Even though it bears the classic Leisure Suit Larry moniker, Magna Cum Laude is not really a Leisure Suit Larry game. Whereas the first few LSL titles were witty, fun, and interesting PC adventures, Magna Cum Laude is somewhat going down a different track. We are certain that if teenagers around the country were forced to deal with Magna Cum Laude’s insane loading times and awful gameplay, the mere mention of words such as “Weiner,” and “Double Anal” would send them into fits of boredom and irritability.

Magna Cum Laude has three major problem areas: gameplay, design, and delivery. The story falls somewhere within the domains of design and delivery, although there’s little use in being discerning as the plot is terrible either way. You play Larry Lovage, nephew of the hilarious Larry Laffer, star of the old LSL games. You’ve just gone to college and you’re trying to get on a dating show called Swingles. After introducing yourself to the foul-mouthed host of the show, you learn that in order to compete in the Swingles competition you have to present mementos of sexual conquests to the show’s crew, thereby proving your playa status. Huh-huh, dude, in order to score, you’ve got to, like, score.

Larry needs two main resources to complete his…ahem, quests. They are money and confidence, once he has them he’s ready to talk to some girls. This always involves a mini-game where you guide a sperm down a gauntlet of symbols. If you hit a green happy face, Larry will say something funny. If you hit a gas-cloud, Larry will fart. If you hit a penis, Larry will make some non-sequitorial remark about penises, and if you hit a beer-jug Larry will get slightly drunker…even if he’s not drinking anything. For every girl you hit on, you’ll play this game approximately three times. So by the time you’ve marked six girls, you will have played this same crappy mini-game about eighteen times.

When you’ve finally talked a girl’s ear off, it’s time to get her drunk. This occasionally involves a rousing game of Whack-a-Mole (where you have to press a button before it disappears), and always means a game of quarters. To bounce a quarter, you pull the right stick (or mouse) back and then push it forward. That’s it. Quarters gets the girls drunk, and then you wind up getting it on with them in some form or another.

Clearly, the ability to get it on with bare-chested, digital renderings of the opposite sex is Magna Cum Laude’s most enticing feature. If you manage to drag yourself through an entire courtship process, you will be treated to about fifteen seconds of something you’ve never seen before in a video game, like a slutty, rendered girl getting banged by a Teddy bear wearing a strap-on, or a nude band geek getting pleasured by a guy dressed as a flaming bundle of twigs. On the other hand, in several cases nothing happens, because Larry mysteriously loses his nerve and leaps out the window.

Which is exactly what you’ll want to do after staring at Magna Cum Laude’s smorgasbord of loading screens. Apparently, the developers at High Voltage had never heard of streaming, because every time you move from one of the game’s small environments to another, you’re treated with a Herculean load time. If you finish a mini-game, expect to wait a minute and a half. If you leave your dorm room, it takes a minute. If you go from your dorm room to the Plaid-mart, you can expect at least five minutes of pure loading.

This is bad enough when you know where you’re going, but when you need to find something and are not sure where to look, the loading times become a total nightmare. No matter what bizarre sexual twists await once you’ve found whatever item you’re looking for, it is impossible to search for anything in this game. You do not want to explore, because it takes hours, and this is supposed to be an adventure game. Aside from how tasteless everything is and how bad the mini-games are, the loading times make Magna Cum Laude nigh unplayable. Your average teenage boy could masturbate himself into a coma in the amount of time it would take Larry to search through three screens.

Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude is disappointing one in the long series. As much as we’d like to see more sexual content in games, we’re afraid Magna Cum Laude will do for Mature games what Showgirls did for NC-17 rated movies. The only reason it’s not a complete bore is because it does have quite a few boobs, and we like those a lot. Conversely, the game is a dissapointment. Although it’s hard to ignore the siren call of digital boobery, please, cover your ears and swear an oath of gaming celibacy. You’ll thank us in the morning.