Power of Laughter

Hey Baby, What's Your Sign?

"I wanted to make a videogame about romance and sex, but with a protagonist who is not very good at women," says Lowe. "That was the fun part of it for me: telling a story about a guy who is the butt of all the jokes. There were very few antiheroes in videogames at that time, and actually there still are now."

Imploring the player to demean himself is only possible when the humor is directly integrated into the game. And indeed, the big difference between the classic Larrys and Magna Cum Laude is their humor was an integral part of the story, not something simply tacked upon the core gameplay.

Of course, the classic Larry hexalogy was part of a videogame genre that effectively went extinct by the late '90s. The main components of graphical adventure games (story and logical puzzles) started to appear, although widely scattered, in mainstream 3-D shooters and action games, and the general gaming public lost all interest in slower-paced adventure games. But lately, there's been a resurgence of dialogue-driven videogames, and even graphical adventure games themselves are making a comeback.

Leisure Suit Larry Box Office Bust, the newest Larry adventure made for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC and planned to hit store shelves by the holidays, sadly cannot be added to that list. The creators call it an "adventure game," but instead show an open-world game (again with Larry the Younger in the leading role) with minigame, racing and platforming action. Lowe, however, remains hopeful for a proper Larry adventure in a more distant future.

"Videogame creators have been missing the point for years," he says. "But that will run its course. In more recent videogames, story is becoming important again. They're once again getting the point that games are about interactivity, not about shooting things up. Shooting things up only shortens the interaction."

Ronald Meeus can beat the age verification process of Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards without pressing Alt-X.