Magna cum Laude has a few laughs, but consists mostly of a bunch of boring, uninspired mini-games.
User Rating: 5.8 | Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude PC
Maybe if this had been a movie entitled “National Lampoon Presents: Leisure Suit Larry – Magna cum Laude”, it would have been a funny flick. As a game, however, it basically sucks. This is too bad, because there is some clever writing, some funny dialog, and a lot of colorful (albeit stereotyped) characters. However, the core gameplay consists almost solely of boring, repetitive, and badly outdated minigames. This hardly feels like a game, and since it lacks the open-ended sandbox feeling of a game like Postal 2, there’s not much good that can be said about it. The best that can be said about this game is that you can get some laughs out of it, as long as you’re not expecting too much, but you won't find much of a game. The premise of the game is that you have to get Larry to bed a bunch of women on campus in order to get onto the TV dating show “Swingles”. Accomplishing this basically means going up to them, talking to them, and then getting past a minigame. Once you have done this four or five times, the girl is yours, and the game rewards you with a cut scene. There is a “tapper” minigame, rhythm minigames that have you tap keys along with arrows on the screen, and a dialog minigames. The dialog minigames is the only fun one. Everything else is uninspired garbage. About a third of the game is button-mashing rhythm games. How could somebody release a game like this and think that it’s somehow competitive with what the gaming world has to offer? The game recycles minigames over and over again with different situations. It’s repetitive, occasionally frustrating, and usually just plain boring. The only fun minigame is the dialog minigames. In it, you guide Larry through a conversation by steering a swimming sperm at the bottom of the screen around obstacles. If you hit an obstacle, Larry screws up the conversation. These parts can be quite funny, and they offer a lot of replayability. Even these minigames though, don’t have any depth and can become tiresome. Graphics-wise, this game is definitely nothing special to look at. As you might expect, the limitations of the Playstation 2 and X-Box show up on the screen of your PC. The characters are somewhat blocky, and the environments are all plain looking and ugly. The loading zones are small and the loading times are frequent. The loading times are almost as long as Half-Life 2, a game with much better graphics and technology. The audio for the game is pretty good though. The voice acting is amusing and suitably cartoony. Without it, the game probably would have gone from mediocre to bad. Magna cum Laude has a lot of content to it, provided you feel like sitting through it. Larry can bed a total of about 15 or 20 girls in the game, and between them there’s tons of dialog and lots of minigames. Unfortunately, the funny content isn't wrapped up in a good package. There are some laughs here, but if you want some comic sexual mishaps, try renting “American Pie” instead. It's cheaper and shorter.
