I will admit it. I bought Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust out of nostalgia for the days when Eric Stacey and I played the original while his parents weren’t home and we had to guess at all of the questions you had to answer to prove you were of age to play. It was a twenty dollar impulse buy. It was a mistake.
I like kitsch. I like bad movies. I occasionally enjoy bad games. I was able to derive genuine enjoyment from Sneak King. I thought, “Why not, Melissa? At the very least, it will be funny.”
No. No, it isn’t. It isn’t funny and it isn’t fun.
The writers clearly felt they were clever dudes, and filled each loading screen with an absolutely HI-larious tip, like “You’ll never be able to convince your girlfriend it’s good for her just because it’s filled with protein” and “Real girls are scary anyway” and “Buy a copy of this game for your grandma on her Birthday[sic]” OH HA HA HA HA HA, gentlemen!
The first time (yes, you read that correctly) I played this game, I put about an hour of time into it trying to even FIND the first mission as the minimap AND the camera both suck, and for my time and efforts, I got stuck in some geometry and had to start over. Instead of ripping the disc out and flinging it across the room, I decided that in order to punish myself for my rash purchase decision, I would play the game through to 100% completion and then destroy the disc.
I spent a not-insignificant number of hours playing this game. Here are my grievances. The game entertains the notion that it’s a sandbox style game; in order to complete missions and collect all of the little fucking golden statuettes scattered across the map, you need to execute parkour-like moves up and across buildings and every surface. Unfortunately, the controls are utter shit–unresponsive and inconsistent, and the geometry is also inconsistently designed. Ledges that you should be able to jump to and things you ought to be able to climb on are blocked off by invisible walls that shimmer when Larry slams into them at full speed at a height that will kill him as you can’t recover from a fall. If Larry runs anywhere near a moving golf cart, he turns into a boneless mass and flops down on to the ground. The AI consistently walks and drives into corners, and gets stuck in geometry until eventually they disappear. Larry looks like a poster child for Axe body spray, meaning I’m fairly sure that any time you’re not watching him onscreen, he’s off raping someone. Everyone else just looks freakish. There are characters roaming all around the world map, but you can only interact with specific people on missions, so the NPCs repeat the same two sentences over and over “Watch the hands, mister” and “Hey! I’m walkin’ here!”. You’d never know they paid well-known actors and actresses as voiceover talent unless they advertised it because the cut scenes are so atrocious that all you can focus on is how terrifying everything looks in-game. The dialogue is terrible. I’ve had funnier looking things come out of my various orifices than anything that happened onscreen.
However, my largest grievance is this: I collected a lot of statuettes in the hours I played. I was working my stats up to several different achievements. I saved my game (and there are not many places you can save your game which is also a hunk of shit) so I could take a dinner break, and when I went back to load my game…something had glitched and all of my progress up to the save was gone. WHAT. THE. FUCK. WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK!?!
I will NOT redo all of that work. I don’t have the time to play through to 100% completion in one sitting, and frankly, that’s a punishment even I don’t feel I deserve. So, I leave to you, dear friends: What do I do?
*edit* I have called Gamestop and they will give me eight whole dollars for the game if that affects your vote one way or another.
