Techtite's What Went Wrong --- When Entertainment Goes Awry!

Who wouldn't want a return to the classic stories of adventure game lore? Well, everyone would...including those FPS lovers in the back without their hand raised. You know you loved Leisure Suit Larry as much as the rest of us, right? Right...?

By all accounts, Leisure Suit Larry seen in a "3D" game engine for the very first time...? That sounds like a grand plan! But then the resulting Larry "sequel," Magna Cum Laude, barely sold at all. At least that's what we can conclude, based on its lackluster reviews online. Making bad into worse; rumors say that its planned sequel was scrapped. This is quite surprising, when said sequel had a full year and a half of production time put into it, prior to its dismissal. It would appear that Larry's "Laude" was really...that...bad. What Went Wrong?

What Went Right? Everything needs a good story. That's perhaps the hub of every compliment to be made about Magna Cum Laude. So funny was the story that, when it came to reviewing this game, I liked it. It was pretty much the funniest game I'd played in years at the time. Sure, less than a year later, that honor now goes to Psychonauts, which long story short, is not going into this "What Went Wrong" column anytime soon. If you played it, you know why.

But at its core, Larry's collegiate story was a good story. I would go so far as to say this: had this been a DVD and not a game, things may have been way different. Think about it. Many video game characters of lore have been made into animated films and TV shows, including Sonic the Hedgehog and Pac-Man. It was not infeasible to make this whole game into a direct-to-DVD movie. For fans of animated entertainment like Heavy Metal, it would've sold. For fans of Animal House and other college/frat flicks, it would've sold. For fans of the Farrelly Brothers style comedy, it would've sold. Not to get ahead of ourselves, but if the game element was as fun as the humor, this would've been a smash hit.

Yet this was sold as an adventure game. What Went Right there? Well, for one, there is the way this game improved the typically banal "conversations puzzle" in adventure gaming. Instead of the standard multiple choice list of possible responses in each conversation, you would play a mini-game when talking to someone. How well you played the game affected how well you "spoke," as it were. The trick was to dodge the red icons in the game (bad responses) while hitting the green icons (witty responses). Hit enough green icons and Larry kept saying the right thing: hit a red icon and he'd say the wrong thing. This made the otherwise boring adventure game "conversation puzzles" the most fun they've ever been...in our opinion, anyway.

It also helped that the characters you met were so...ahem...developed. Voice acting, character animation, and the overall "look" and "feel" of the game was very well handled. In short you would want the story to proceed, because you wanted to see more of these characters. How many times has a "first person shooter" made you feel the same way?

What Went Wrong? Mind you; I really liked this game, for all the above reasons. With its humor, it's story, and its overall interactive-Animal-House flair, it was hardly a game that I left thinking, "Whoh, that totally sucked." It was a flawed game, sure, but "totally sucked" would be pushing it. So I must repeat myself here, that What Went Wrong is not a column about the "garbage" products that I want to ridicule. Like other WWWrong subject matter, this is more like, "Great idea...good points...yet didn't sell well...what happened here?

Here is one big mistake this game made, right out of the gate: no Al Lowe, the man who created Larry, as well as headed the design team on all 7 prior Larry games. Sure, many a Star Wars cynic will tell you that the new trilogy would've been "better" without George Lucas (or so they wish to believe). However, the Larry games were Al Lowe's brainchild; his vision. To not include him in the project was the first really big mistake.

Not that this decision was unexplainable. You can sympathize with this game's designers. They wanted this sequel to be "their" game. They didn't want Lowe to come in and say "you should do this that way" or "don't do this do that." But there's something the designers of this game obviously lacked, that Lowe had: experience. So many errs in this game were due to what was clearly someone's first attempt at adventure gaming, because such design flaws as these were so easily preventable.

One of the biggest things that an experienced game designer could've helped with, were the excessive load times. In any typical game, a whole "area" is loaded at once. Not so for Laude...! Enter the library and a new level loads. Enter the library's basement and a new level loads. Exit the library and the "outside" level loads. Enter the dorm across the street and a new level loads. There is no reason an experienced game design team could not have made this whole area one level. But here's what's really wacky; approach any of the the ladies you meet along the way, and you have...another load screen! Aaaaaarrrrrggggghhhhh!!!

What's worse: instead of making load screens less frequent, they actually tried to make load screens more "interesting." This was, quite frankly, a fool's errand. No, a load screen by any other name is not "more interesting." You can't pose a "real" model a la "Sally Mae" and expect that load screen to be "fun." It's still a load screen. Sorry.

Yet the biggest design flaw with this game was how its mini-game format snubbed its nose at the adventure game crowd; a perplexing design choice indeed, when this was the game series' core audience. Yet this "adventure game sequel" offered less adventure, and more mini-games. No story arcs. No puzzles. No problem solving. No brain twisters. Seeing as how brain teasers are at least 90% of any popular adventure game, it was rather odd an adventure game sequel had none of them.

Of course, it didn't help that the mini games weren't terribly good. Mind you; one of the mini-games was a lot like the classic arcade game Root Beer Tapper, and I'm a fan of that, so I was happy. Yet even if you were a fan of that, there was little else, and if you weren't a fan of that, you had even less. One mini game gave you a sequence of keys and you had to repeat them in order. Another mini game had an arrow flash on the screen in an instant, and you had to press the correct arrow key within one second. These mini-games were as fun to play as they sound, which is to say, they really weren't.

Then there were all the "little" mistakes in game design. For one thing: this game is not about Larry Laffer, but rather Larry's nephew. The idea is not unlike a Scooby Doo " sequel" starring only Scrappy Doo. You want the definitive "little" design mistake...? "Larry" breaks wind every time you press the "action" key, wherever no other action is possible. This got old very quickly ... especially when trying to figure out the game interface for the first time, with Larry farting every step of the way. Then there was the unfair difficulty arc, which would begin at "boringly easy" and end somewhere near "hair-pulling hard." If you're going to make a collection of natty parlor games; you need a difficulty menu and a fairer difficulty curve. This game had neither of these.

In the end, however, this game made one core flaw: it did not bother to make a sequel that most of the game series' fans would want. Do diehard adventure gamers want a mini game collection? No! Yet that's what they got here. What if someone made a sequel to Quake with no guns? The reaction would be the same. It's not like another Larry adventure game isn't a good idea. But that isn't what Larry fans were given. I can guarantee you a new Leisure Suit Larry adventure would sell. This was not that sequel. It doesn't get simpler than that.

Article by Techtite, copyright 2006; all rights reserved. Title graphics, and pix not of reviewed product, are created by Techtite, copyright 1999-2005; all rights reserved. Screen captures and publicity photos are only for the purpose of this commentary, and by no means represent any affiliation with Techtite and the distributors of that product. For further "legalese" & disclaimers, click here...

What Went Wrong?

An Analysis Column, by Techtite

Leisure Suit Larry:

Magna Cum Laude

(An "Adventure" Game on PC & X-Box, 2004)

Commentary by Techtite