Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust
Developer: Team 17
Publisher: Codemasters
Release Date: March 27, 2009 (PC, PS3, Xbox 360)
Summary of Story-
Lovage is tasked to go under cover at his uncle’s movie studio, to help discover who’s been disrupting the cast and crew. The central hub you’ll be running around is the studio lot, with three separate movie theme locals as dream sequences. Each one based off over three genres, Western, Horror, and Drama, to show how the developer’s thick heads jammed in as many pop culture references they could. SPOILER! After a few nab and jab quests, Lovage uncovers the master mind, IT WAS KIP, and a happy ending is achieved, at least for Lovage that is. The ending consists of Lovage finally getting Amy, the main love interest, as well as two coworkers with strap-ons.
There, now you can tell your friends you got the cliff-notes of the story.
Side note: It makes me disheartened to discover the storyline was actually written by Allen Covert, the lead actor in Grandma’s Boy. (For those unfamiliar with the series, Al Lowe was the head writer and creator of the original series, but left long before Box Office Bust was released.) I enjoy his inflection and range he delivers in films, but just knowing he help ruin the franchise doesn’t settle well with me.
Voice Acting-
I was surprised at the noticeable voices I’d recognized from several of the cast members. With Patrick Warburton, voiced Brock Samson in Venture Bros, playing an animal fetish loving big shot movie star Damone LeCoque. Or Peter Graves, of Airplane fame, portrayed as wash up old man Clark Taslemuff. (Though from his dialogue and slur in speech, it seems Peter was drunk throughout the recording sessions). Finally we got the protagonist himself, Larry Lovage, voiced by Josh Keaton. (Who you may recognize in the video game world as voicing the latest Spiderman, Young Hercules in the Kingdom Hearts series and even Robin in Batman: Arkham Origins.)
Lovage: "Welcome to Poontown, population 70."
(A scream is heard in the distance)
Lovage: "Make that 69. Oh yeah!!"
-Beefcake Mountain
Lack of development-
The main environments are colorful, in that pop-up book for 5 year olds type, with hardly ANYONE to fill in the empty voids. Sure you’ll come across a guy driving around in a cart, or a person chatting it up with a coworker, but that’s it. This game truly feels lacking in the development process, with a lack of ambient outside mission music, with reiterating looping mission tracks, and the health bar recovery shown during a cut scene clearly indicates some noticeable ones up front.
Another annoying irk the game pulls out of its own ass is its often unclear as to where to reach your objective, even if labeled as high or low on the GPS, mainly due to unclear paths to choose from. This really takes effect when time based missions, with no checkpoints, makes you go ballistic when you realize you spent eight minutes inside a hotel going floor to floor, when all you really needed was to go outside to reach it.
Animation wise there are some specifics I do enjoy, such as the goofy cartoonish run and wall hanging Lovage does, while others remind me not to give too much credit (When the timer actually stops to let the climb on/off ladder animation go, just shows how ridiculously lethargic it takes. ). Ladders suck!!
Controls-
The main controls are handled as a platformer merged into in an open world format. Considering the original series was a point-n-click structure, this could have led to an interesting twist in the series. However, this sucks due to the misjudgment of jumps and overshooting movements from the oversensitive controls. Hell, even performing a simple ledge grab is often luck based; with micro adjustments in midair seem to deem vastly different results. Frequently I found myself exploiting the system by jumping around corners to skip tedious padding segments.
Camera-
Most of the time, you have control of the camera to look around Lovage, yet most platforming sections lock the camera in place to create a visual thrilling view. In spite of this normal gameplay element most platformers do (i.e. Ratchet and Clank series), It tends to create tank controls by sudden camera shifts and thus led to copious amounts of frustrating unwarranted deaths.
Lovage: "I’m gonna shove a stake so far up your ass it’s going to look like you grew a new fang!"
-Horror Coffin
Mission Structure-
Main Missions: The majority of the missions get tiresome real quick due to the repetitive nature of them requiring an item to be taken and/or placed, usually locating on a roof, all while a timer ticks away meticulously. Storyline missions and side quests are thankfully separated on the completion wise, but it does leave an important conundrum. The dating quests are considered side quests, IN a Leisure Suit Larry game, whose main goal in every game is to get laid!(It was more funnier when it was the original 40 year old virgin Laffer doing the dating, compared to the juvenile teenage nephew Lovage.) This may have been done intentionally in order to establish a connection with Lovage and his coworker Amy in the main storyline.
Side Quests:
Driving- After beating a dream sequence, a race quest will open up, but given my own personal abhorrence of racing games, this was the only side quest I actually skipped out on. (But I had plenty of driving in the open world map to know racing wouldn’t even be entertaining, as the max speed you’ll reach is that of a faulty golf cart.)
Collectibles- 100 gold statues of Lovage’s Uncle Laffer are spread throughout the map, with your only real enticement for getting them is achievements.
Dating- You start off every date by walk up to the “Employee of the Moment” board to learn Lovage’s next potential victim, er I mean girl, he wants to “date”. After making a bad first impression, Lovage is tasked to fetch an item. Once acquired, you’ll return to the girl and start randomly hitting buttons till the “humorous” dialogue options dwindle down to a win win for Lovage.
Now for the sake of clarity, I’ve detailed one of the horrendous quests you’ll partake, from the Beefcake Mountain Sequence, in order to showcase an average mood one will besieged upon one’s self.
• Mission starts with quest to find the old prospector, in order to use his dynamite to blow open the big safe in bank.
• The GPS displays a list of twenty individuals to ask for the old prospector’s location, and then get told to “fuck off” by each person.
• Get the correct info at the 19 person, while venting at the amount of people you had to ask.
• Ride horse to location, only to fall off cliff from clunky controls.
• Game auto reloads to the start of the mission.
• Turn off game to play a better game, then reload save.
• Repeat the ask 20 people section; seek out the last person from before for info, only to find out they now don’t recall the info.
• Then attempt to skip to location due to former knowledge of prospector’s location, but game prevents you from riding there till you ask 19/20 people.
• Ride Horse to location after asking 19 people, AGAIN. WHY EVEN TELL ME ITS OUTTA 20!?
• Watch cut scene of your destination get cut short, forced to take long meticulous route.
• Finally get a checkpoint, a rarity for this game.
• Die from buggy forced camera angle.
• Repeat several times till blood vessels burst forth from arms.
• Arrive at location, and witness a shortcut being open. Fuck.
• End of Mission. (Wow! What a complex and enriching mission this has been.)
Something that should have taken less than five minutes has instead been stretched to a shocking 30 minutes!
Amy: "My name’s Lily… as in pad. What’s your name?"
Lovage: "Jack… as in off in two minutes…I hope that’s not a deal breaker."
-Bytanic
Mini-Games-
Certain missions will have a gimmick to spice up the lack of entertainment from the humorless dialogues or numerous fetch quests, while each dream sequence will have a unique mini game associated within their realms.
Basics:
Gun fights- Most shooting sections require precision aiming, as you’ll be reduced to pong movement, or a per-planned awareness of attacker’s location is required to pass.
Fist Fights- Fist fighting is poor as the developers merged the punch button with the jump button, as well as the difficulty scale gets wonky when ganged up by more than three enemies.
QTE’S- Some Quick Time Events will arrive in either cut scenes or taking pictures, however these moments are far too easy, as the time given is long enough for any slowpoke to react.
Stealth-Lastly, stealth sequences can be easily beaten due to being able to jump on top of enemy’s heads to avoid being seen. The game later on turn the tables on these moments by sticking you in an outfit that makes you intentionally slow, as well as making Lovage erratically move wildly.
Unique:
Beefcake Mountain- Sniper Shooting requires Lovage to dose up several women, as well as a few horses, for LeCoque to have his way with. While controls were too loose for my preference, I had no problem getting the required score.
Horror Coffin- Zombie Basher has Lovage running around a pac-man like environment, attacking zombies and gaining power ups. Certain power-ups felt too similar, as the title for each one didn’t give off many details, but I was able to enjoy the novelty of exploding zombies.
Bytanic- Then we get Shuffleboard, A game wholly unfamiliar with cruise ships, where Lovage tries to hit the target while avoiding the bird poo traps. With the opponent AI managing to hit every bird poo made winning far too easy to feel any real accomplishments.
Last Words-
In summary, Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust isn’t worth your time, or bribery money, to invest in. Sure there may be a line or two that gives you hope, but atlas poor yorick, it doesn’t happen enough to warrant a purchase.
Score: 20%
20-29%: Terrible - Almost no good qualities are found here.
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