Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust can best be summed up in two words:  missed opportunity.

At first glance, this game seems to be a decent platformer.   I like platforming games (think Mario 64), but as an adult sometimes I just want to trade the “Gee wilickers!”  games for an “expletive deleted!” one. Tired of kid-friendliness, my initial thought was, “Yay ! A platforming game geared toward the adult audience!” My parting thoughts however, were more focused on creative ways to destroy the disc.

The premise of the game is fairly straight-forward.  You play as Larry, the nephew of the original Leisure Suit Larry, and you’re working for Uncle Larry at his adult-film movie lot.  There’s a mole from the rival movie studio on the staff, and through various missions, you must root him out.  Occasionally little Larry falls asleep on various movie sets, opening up new adventures in a dreamscape similar to the movie set.  Your first task is cleaning graffiti of male genitalia off the buildings on the lot, and sets the tone for the rest of the game.  

There are a few high points.  The overall design looks like what you’d expect if Chuck Jones of Looney Tunes fame were a game designer instead of animator.  The bright colors and the cartoony look make for fun environments to explore.  The cast of voice actors are all very familiar, including Dave Attell, Tom Arnold, Carmen Electra and more.  Jay Mohr plays the main villain, and even Patrick Warburton (Family Guy’s Joe Swanson) plays one of the main characters.  The humor in the game is hit-or-miss.  If you enjoy low-brow humor like Beavis and Butthead, you’ll enjoy some of the jokes and gags in this game. Thanks to Box Office Bust, I heard the word “buttmunch” for the first time in at least five years.   If you’re too good for that kind of humor, you should steer clear.  There are some laugh-out-loud moments, and more often than not, jokes that fall flat desperately grasping for the shock factor.

It doesn’t take long for the love to go bust with Box Office Bust.   What could have been a decent game is almost completely spoiled by the controls.  This isn’t a compliant like the one raised by games like Resident Evil 5, where the controls aren’t great, but the game helps redeem it.  LSL:BOB is broken.  Nothing is more frustrating than playing a game, pressing the right buttons, and seeing your character jump off a cliff anyway.  Apparently, Larry can’t stand it either.  It’s probably for the best anyway.  At least with a game like RE5, you can get the hang of the controls and deal with it.  With LSL:BOB, half of the game’s challenge comes from battling the controls themselves.  Coupling poor controls with arbitrary time limits make it become nearly impossible and maddeningly frustrating, equaling an exercise in masochism instead of an adult-themed diversion.  On top of that, checkpoints are spaced so far out that you sometimes find yourself replaying the same 3-10 minutes of the game over and over only to die at the hands of the controls in the exact same spot as you did the last ten times.

The fun doesn’t stop there.  There are audio and visual problems.  Although the dialogue isn’t going to win any awards, at times it seems the only redeeming quality of the game.  Unfortunately, it sounds like someone is playing with the volume knob during some of the cut scenes.  When a character speaks at a normal voice and then says something quietly, the quiet part is sometimes inaudible (and no, my volume knob isn’t broken.)  It would be forgivable if the game wasn’t relying so heavily on its crass humor to keep you playing, but instead the last hope for LSL:BOB gets lost in translation.  The lighting in the game causes a couple of weird effects as well.  At many points in the game, you will see Larry casting two or three shadows.  I’m no scientist, but no amount of drugs can make that happen in regular sunlight.  Why not opt for a simple circular shadow under the character? The lighting also wreaks havoc on the skin of the characters.  Characters often look like they’re suffering from early stages of leprosy thanks in part to the odd lighting and shadows. 

In the words of the great Billy Mays, “But wait, there’s more!”  If you are brave enough to try this game, you too will become very familiar with the ‘Load Game’ option from the pause menu.  Thanks to some bugs and peculiar collision detection, driving vehicles will soon become as frustrating as everything else in this game.  Here’s a scenario that happened to me more than once:  Driving a golf cart to complete a mission, I’m nearing my destination.  I hit a wall and I’m stuck in it.  I’m at an awkward angle and idiot Larry can’t seem to find a way out OF A GOLF CART!    It doesn’t even have doors!  In games like Grand Theft Auto IV, you may find yourself in a situation where your car is stuck and in real life you couldn’t get out.  Although it looks weird, GTA4 will pop you out on top of the car (or beside it) and you can continue.  LSL:BOB on the other hand, will leave you trapped inside a golf cart to die a slow and horrible death of starvation as the player bludgeons themselves to death with their controller.  The only thing worse than getting a golf cart stuck in/on a wall is doing the same thing on horseback.  Does Larry get off the horse?  No, of course not, he’s apparently high on drugs and can’t jump off a horse.  Or do anything, except wait for you to reload and start over.  Again.

 Even at a bargain price, this game is not worth it.  In fact, in the future you may hear me refer to this game.  That’s because Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust is about as low as the bar can get in modern gaming.  You’d be better served by taking 25 dollars and setting them on fire—and then putting it out with your bare hands.  If Simon Cowell were reviewing this, I’m sure he’d say something mean like, “This game is best enjoyed by people without thumbs.  That way they couldn’t play it.”  The missed opportunity to forsake the younger audience for a grown-ups only platformer is hard to forgive.   Had they been given a few more months, Vivendi could have polished this game into a classic—the potential is certainly there.  Overall the game feels rushed, and as if only a handful of people put it together.  Either that or they blew their whole budget on celebrity voices.   In the game-maker’s defense, this game was lost in the shuffle of the merger of Vivendi and Activision (which resulted in gaming behemoth Activison-Blizzard.)  This game almost never saw the light of day, with new bosses in the merger leaving its future uncertain, and perhaps to blame for the lack of quality.  Maybe we can hold out hope for a well-polished sequel, but it seems highly unlikely after the money they wasted pressing this steaming pile onto a disc. 

Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust is rated M for Mature for Blood and Gore, Drug Reference, Mature Humor, Strong Language, Strong Sexual Content, Violence

Kevin “Mello Joe” Mercer is a former radio personality and a lifelong gamer. You can find him on Xbox Live and Playstation Network, Gamertag: Mellojoe. View the world as he sees it at www.youtube.com/user/mellojoe. www.myspace.com/charlesk