After Vivendi Universal bought Sierra they obviously wanted to cash in with the better-known brands of the studio. In many ways, going back to the well that is Leisure Suit Larry seemed like a sound idea. In 2003, they announced the title, Magna Cum Laude, the first game in the series made without Al Lowe at the helm. The end result is a less-than-stellar collection of story-driven minigames set on a school campus, where the nephew of Larry Laffer, Larry Lovage is trying his hardest to get into the pants of as many girls as he can.
I think this should be made clear right from the bat: Magna Cum Laude is not an adventure game in any way or form. It might look like a 3rd-person, 3D adventure, but in reality, it is an uninspiring collection of repeating minigames you have to play ad nauseam in order to proceed. There are no puzzles, just a set of minigames you play again and again with different girls and varying difficulty levels. Some people do claim this is an adventure game, but its relation to the genre is merely superficial. And as for being a Larry game, it's mostly in name only.
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| Larry is in his room. Notice the photo of Uncle Larry on his bedstand |
The story of this sordid tale goes as follows: Lovage, a student at Walnut Log Community College, wants to enter in Swingles dating show. But the host, Uma, doesn't think the big-headed dork has what it takes, so she tasks him to gather tokens of affection from several ladies around the campus. And that's pretty much it: you find the girls, play the minigames and return the tokens to Uma in order to proceed to more girls. The whole thing is laced with comedy that, depending on your tastes, is either funny, uncomfortable, crude or just boring. Despite I did chuckle a couple of times, I found the jokes mostly boring, some even uncomfortable.
It's safe to say, none of the previous Larry games had as many girls as Magna Cum Laude does. That's most likely because of the lack of any meaningful gameplay: to pad the game, the developers have just thrown in any imaginable stereotype from every frat movie around. So you have your farmer's daughters, mafia girls, art students, cool girls and everything in between in the form of 16 girls sprinkled all over the campus and its surrounding area.
To get in the action and to witness the inevitable failure of Lavage's, you have to perform the following formula with each girl. The first thing is to talk to them in the form of a minigame, where a sperm cell swims along the lane. The goal is to avoid red bombs and gather green smiley faces and hearts, which either raise or lower the charm meter. If you succeed in keeping the meter green, you get to the next phase.
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| Talking minigame. Avoid the red icons, try to catch the greens. If the heart rim changes yellow, you are in danger of losing the girl. Larry's shape on the right indicates your drunkenness level. All yellow is flat-out drunk, making moving the sperm harder. |
The next step is another minigame. This can be a game of quarter toss, trampoline jumping, streaking, collecting a set number of items, bartending or slaps. Win the game, which leads into the next phase, which usually is more talking and perhaps followed by another minigame, then maybe a bit more talking and finally score, or something in the realm of failure. Usually failure.
At times, the girls are a bit picky and require a bit extra, like a different set of clothes, which can be bought from proprietors or wending machines. So you have to have money, which can be gathered from betting and collecting in minigames, selling candid photos of girls or found from hidden locations. Personally, I recommend cheating, as it makes the game more bearable.
Another thing to keep a lookout for are the secret tokens, which can be used to purchase some items to make the minigames a bit easier. The tokens can be also used to unlock game extras, like fully nude models for the girls. Again, the best option is just to cheat. Just load Cheat Engine or some other game hacker and make your life easier if you really want to play the game fully. The experience won't suffer a bit, hell, it makes it a bit more toleratable. Especially as you can use the tokens to instantly win the minigames, which comes in handy with the later discussion minigame.
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| Quarters minigame. Get a quarter in the glass to get the lady drunk. The girls look terribly small next to Larry and his huge head. |
If you want to interact with the girls, you do have to keep tabs on your self-esteem meter. If it's too low, you'll have a harder time playing the minigames. The meter can be filled with by succeeding in minigames as well as drinking booze and coffee. But drinkin' too much booze is a disabling factor as well, so you need to clear your head as well. This happens by either drinking coffee or pissing all over the place. Yes. Now you can finally freely piss in public and on innocent bystanders to your heart's content. There's even a tracker that keeps tabs on how many gallons you've peed because that's humour.
You might be wondering if the titular Leisure Suit Larry, as in Larry Laffer, is in the game at all. He is. Not as a playable character, but as a side character, who at times gives hints to Lovage as well as spends his days at the Lefty's Too bar. The campus area is also full of all kinds of small references and easter eggs to other games in the series. That's really as far as connecting Magna Cum Laude to the rest of the series goes.
It is very easy to see Al Lowe had nothing to do with Magna Cum Laude, even if the game had been a more traditional, or even a 3rd-person adventure game, the style of humour, both verbal and visual, is very different from what he did with the series. Quite often the writing has a nastier, even more insulting and perhaps a tad more misogynistic streak about it. Lowe, on the other hand, has often stated he ran his jokes through his wife, who was to him a measurement point in how offending a joke was. If she didn't approve, the joke would not end in the game. Here no such barriers have been presented and the game clearly aims to be edgier than any of the Larry games before it.
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| Are you not entertained? |
Originally Vivendi was in contact with Al Lowe about MCL, but at one point he learned, that the game had been written and his input would not be needed. So he had nothing to do with how the game turned out. After the MCL came out, he stated that it wasn't as bad as the reviews made out, but he didn't think much of it either. In short, it was very far from what he'd done himself.
Lowe had an idea for Larry 8, and he even worked on a 3D prototype for the game, but in the end, Vivendi had other ideas for the series. He left Larry getting abducted by aliens at the end of Love For Sail, so his Larry 8 would have been very different.
Magna Cum Laude is a juvenile game in the bad sense of the word. The biggest failings of it stem from the poor script as well as bad game design. It's somewhat of a shame, that the first Loweless outing of Larry was marred this way, as this could have been at least a decent adventure game. As it stands now, it's merely an excuse for making the player go through repetitive minigames until the ending is reached. Also, a thing that has to be mentioned is, the MCL is, especially the uncut version, at times borderline pornographic in how it handles sex and nudity. None of the original Sierra games goes as far as MCL does.
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| Uma, the host of Swingles |
It's not like there isn't anything positive about it. The game looks pretty nice and the music is fine. The voice acting ranges from passable to good and some of the setups could work as platforms for some genuinely good puzzles.
If anything, Magna Cum Laude is a missed opportunity. A game, that was designed from the wrong starting point and end in mind. When people talk of the sexist game series known as Leisure Suit Larry, MCL is the game they are most likely referring to. In almost every way it is a stark contrast to how Al Lowe handled the series. Even at its worst, Lowe's Larry was never like this. It doesn't help that Larry Lovage is a pretty greasy character, whose throws meant as jokes often come out a bit rapey.
Magna Cum Laude is a prime example of a comedy that mistakes crudeness and boorishness as wit. It is a constant bombardment of cursing, infantilism, tits and ass, probably in the hopes that the rapid-fire of all the crassness the writers and designers could come up with would amount to comedy gold. It doesn't. It never does. Profanity for profanities sake doesn't substitute for comedy.
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| Zanna, one of the girls who is also a Soviet spy, because being a Soviet spy was still a relevant thing in 2004. Topical comedy, that's the key. |
But what really is interesting is, that Magna Cum Laude isn't even the worst Larry series has to offer. No, that one is reserved for the second Larry Lovage game, Box Office Bust. And how bad is it? If Metacritic is anything to go by, its review Metascore is only 20 (of 100) and even user rate is 2.0 (of 10). It's also the only game in the series that isn't sold anywhere, at least in digital form. You might be (un)lucky enough to find a physical copy if you really want a legal copy of it. In comparison, MCL managed to score around 60 from critics and 5.1 from the players.
Surprisingly enough, Magna Cum Laude can still be bought digitally from GOG and Steam. I say surprisingly, as this game was crude even for the time it came out. Now, it stands out even more. It definitely is a kind of a game some publishers would try to sweep under the rugs and no developer, at least with name recognition, would try to do today. If that's a good thing or bad is up for debate, but if you want to see the game yourself and make up your own mind about it, you can do that with ease.
If you are interested in reading my take on the original Larry games, you can start from here.
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