Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude

by Vivendi Universal

Product Features

• Adult-themed adventure game
• Play as the college-attending nephew of the '80s-era Leisure Suit Larry character
• Players roam a fully-realized college campus trying to romance coeds
• Conversation, dancing, and other types of minigames help you rack up points with the ladies
• For 1 player

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0001XLMTY
• Product Dimensions: 1.4 x 5.3 x 7.6 inches ; 4.3 ounces
• Media: CD-ROM
• Release Date: October 5, 2004
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #19,954 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Platform: PC

College is tough for Larry - he's basically a pathetic loser who occasionally gets out and hits on women, but things always go horribly wrong. When a reality TV dating show comes to campus, Larry decides he's going to revitalize his life by winning the contest and proving once and for all that he can live up to the shining example set by his Old Uncle Larry.

Follow Larry's hilarious exploits and misadventures in the wackiest college story ever. Updated for the 21st century with 3D graphics, engaging real-time conversations, and a fully realized college campus, Larry is back to give gamers some lovin'.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

58 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For entertainment value I give it a five, October 18, 2004

By 

Heather Hays (Goodfellow-AFB, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude (CD-ROM)

Previous reviewers have noted that the adventure game-play in this game is non-existant. They are correct. There aren't any puzzles or strange problems that need solving, no pixel hunting. It takes a little while to become accustomed to the interface. The control system is funky and involves a lot of keyboard hot keys and little mouse manuevering. In that respect, it is different from the earlier Larry games. I originally disliked it, but it grew on me.

It's better to compare the style of this game to "Dead Or Alive Beach volleyball." A lot of shots of lucious co-eds and a couple of mini-games such as coin tossing, running away from various angry fathers, Deportation employees etc. It is also in no way shape or form, hard. Even the arcade sequences have the option of being passed over after losing about 5 times. For me, this was fine, because this kind of thing easily annoys and bores me.

And now to the game's strong point, its hilarious plotting. The characters are very well developed and like an interactive "National Lampoon" spoof, you run into all kinds of jokes just navigating the game's many locations. A lot of entertainment alone lies in eavesdropping on the various characters hanging around the campus. For instance, in the library there is a guy that is getting charged about two hundred dollars late fees for checking out 20 some magazines all on the subject of "tea-bagging".

The girls all have their various quirks and I found myself playing the conversation mini-game over and over again just to roll my mouse over the red pellets and hear all the outrageous, tacky and downright taste-less things that Larry ends up saying when he makes a mistake and hits a red pellet. (Each pellet he hits changes the conversation. If he hits the green ones, he'll be nice.) I found myself laughing out loud.

The girls you're chasing after are hilarious. I don't if I said that already, but I'll say it again. They range from a "band geek" to a foreign exchange student who speaks hilariously broken English, and there are tons of them. I'm thinking at least 12.

I have one final point to touch on. It goes with the maturity level of this game. This game is much more risque than the originals. It features frequent bad language and often goes beyond simply "hinting" at things. And while the game is loading, you are often presented with actual photographs of scantily clad women. Sometimes, I felt like I was flipping through play-boy and being a girl, I felt like I shouldn't be playing this.

But this is a really fun game. I actually just got done playing it. I played for about 4 hours because it's also mildly addictive and a great way to waste time.

So don't just play the game to beat it, because that's not where the fun is situated. Play around with it, walk around campus and see the sights.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars you can almost smell the polyester, October 7, 2004

By 

Paul M. Varga "Tauren Guard" (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

= Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude (CD-ROM)

Well, I bought the game yesterday and played it quite a few hours into the night. The downside was my sucky Intel graphics card barely keeps the screen clear arter the first hour or two. The game did warn me about that beforehand. I tried playing it in a computer window rather than full screen but that lagged it like crazy.
Soooooo, for those of you WITH a decent graphics card, here's my overall report.
The mini-games in the overall game itself fall into one of five types:
1) The conversation game where your game character is a sperm that you have to move around vertically to grab happy faces for Larry to say something nice, while avoiding the red icons that either make him say something stupid or make him more drunk, making the control of the sperm near impossible. This, in my opinion is the most frustrating of the games.
2) The dancing/trampoline game where 'up', 'down', 'left'', 'right', and 'button' icons skim across the bottom of your screen and you have to hit those keys ('button' being the enter/return key), in the right order at the right time to win the competition and impress your opponent to gain confidence for Larry (and sometimes money).
3) The bartending game is much like the previous one only you have the left, right, up, and down icons on the screen in four circles and you have to hit them when they light up.
4) The 'quarters' game which, for veteran college residents, plays just like Quarters at your local kegger. I suggest holding the quarter just below the opponents' neck level and toward the left edge of the glass.

5) Anyone remember the old video game 'Tapper'? Well, it's in this game too. You'll either be serving drinks at a bar, handing out flyers, or feeding monkey chow to the monkeys... quite challenging.
There are a LOT of flashback jokes throughout the game. The most disturbing of which being Larry's fairy godmother looking like Ron Jeremy (no, it's not his voice).

There are several strip versions of most of the games; however, a 'censored' sign covers up the privates. You have to go through all of the game before the option of getting rid of those signs is given to you, and even then, you have to get 269 secret tokens in order to activate it.

If any of the missions start getting on your nerves, you can 'wimp out' which takes 4 to 6 tokens away from your stash but it allows you to go to the next mission. In my opinion, of all of Larry's conquests, Morgan is the toughest group of missions.

In Larry's Black Book, you'll find his current objectives, conquests, and purchased wardrobes. The wardrobes are very important in later missions, especially the accessories that go with the outfit. No functional value, mind you, but needed to impress the ladies.. uhhh, women... except Koko.

The reason why I'm explaining all of this is because the morons at Vivendi didn't bother including an instruction manual with the 4 game cds. It took me a long time to figure out how to change larry's clothes (third tab in Larry's Black Book: click on the outfit, and hit the escape button).

Overall, a very fun game. If you're incredibly skilled, you can come up with several different conversations in one mission.

Warnings: nudity (duh), profanity, artificial phallic flinging, art disappreciation (later level of Larry urinating on paintings at a gallery), and mind-numbing frustration, major flashbacks for those of us over 25.

It's worth the $30 for the pc version but I don't know about shelling $45 for the ps2 and xbox versions.

Have fun!

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not the same as before but still fun..., October 15, 2004

By 

J. Guilbert "Ritter" (Montreal, Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude (CD-ROM)

This game is of course a lot different from the old LSL games. I have all of the LSL games and I couldn't pass on the opportunity to have this one of course.

Adventure games died a couple of years back when Sierra (my favorite company in adventure games) decided they were going into action games and leaving adventure behind. This game cannot be called an adventure game as it was like the first LSL games.

This being said, I find the game pretty amusing. It's still in the same spirit that this loser tries as hard as he can to pick up girls. You can only feel sorry for him. The basis is still fun to play with. Like everyone else said, you hae to go through mini-games in order to advance in the game. That is why this is not an adventure game. This is no pick-up and use objects. You don't really need to think, you just need good hands.

The mini-games do sometimes get boring. There are variations of the same game but they all come down to 4 or 5 games overall. The one I like least is the conversations. Like someone already said, you have to play the game to be able to say intelligent things so you sometimes miss the conversation so much you are concentrated on the game. And you miss out on all the animation since you have to look at the game.

In spit of that, I think the game is still pretty fun. It brings back a lot of memories of the old LSL games and the fun I had with all the Sierra games. I would just hope that adventure could come back but the attention span of children today is so small that you cannot have adventure games like before where you have to think about what to do next...

P.S. With all the technology today, I would have thought that we would have Larry almost looking human and girls looking pretty good. In this game, even though you do see some nudity, it's still only animation and the girls don't look or feel real...

2115|RBHGB1GG72YC9;2115|RO4ZHNPBN6AF3;2115|R3OPJTBCCTPKGL;