Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust

It is interesting that it is mainly people over the age of thirty that are giving this title a high score (Team 17 and Codemasters employees perhaps?) because this game is easily the worst title in the Leisure Suit Larry franchise.

First of all, for a game revolving around the porn industry it is pretty sex-less. The girls are interchangeable alien looking pods with beach balls stuffed down their blouse - the most unappealing girls since the original Softporn text adventure - and the gameplay is infuriating with its tedious, boring missions such as... collect something or other that's on a roof... Fun.

Now, I understand that the gaming industry believes "adventure is dead" (The more accurate phrase would be "adventure games are expensive and time consuming".) but this is hardly a good argument in defense of making this series an action game because somewhere in the conversion the designers forgot what Larry is all about.

The humour is lame... lacking the ironic execution of the old Larry's cheesy one-liners and the narrator's gloriously sarcastic witticisms and Larry Laffer is portrayed as an ugly old man in a gaudy pink leisure suit. (How do you screw up the color of his leisure suit?) And you are going to love what they do to Laffer... it's essentially an interpretative dramatisation of what's happening to him in reality.

The graphics amazingly jitter and do not run smoothly at all - the whole production is rushed and the final product looks cheap and that's probably because all the money went to the celebrity voice talent. Do teenagers still find the now middle-aged Carmen Electra sexy?

This is just another bastardisation of a great series as it moves more and more away from its creator's intentions towards being a cheap commodity barely surviving on its marquee value. Codemasters and Team 17 show us that the British game designers have no business working on adaptations of good-natured, traditional Sierra titles.

Garbage.