Sonic’s Ring

I learnt everything I know about love from Larry Laffer. That's possibly why I haven't had any action in a longtime. You see Larry is worse than useless in that area as he demonstrated throughout the eighties and nineties in Al Lowe's legendary Leisure Suit Larry point-n-click series.

Originating from the seminal Sierra studio, Leisure Suit Larry was a  pioneer in gaming. With his creation Al Lowe broached a subject never  covered at the time, and rarely raised since, Sex. It's a tricky  subject. Bioware found themselves on the receiving end of a  nonsensical right-wing media campaign in the US last year. Their game  Mass Effect, one of the few to tackle sex maturely, was exposed as a  hot blue alien sex simulator that was corrupting precious teens.

Larry was corrupting teens two decades ago. Myself and several geek school-friends passed around the disk for our Atari STs, teaming up to answer the questions of the notorious test you had to pass at the start of the first game to prove you were over eighteen. That game taught us in our  formative years that women will rob you blind for nothing in return.  On the flip it taught us that we'd eventually find true love with the  help of a cheesy quip, an inflatable doll and an apple.

Lowe continued to entertain the faithful throughout the point-n-click  salad days, some excellent in the story department and some just okay,  but always funny. With the advent of 3D gaming Larry died alongside  his fallen point n click compadres like Guybrush Threepwood. Relegated  to the sidelines of gaming history.

If you are a regular listener to the cast you'll know of my love for  point-n-clickers.  It's been a personal joy for me to see the return  of my favourite dead genre in the past few years with episodic gaming  from Telltale with the Sam n Max and Monkey Island series leading the  way on the PC. The DS is a natural platform for the genre and Broken  Sword has led a revival on the number one handheld. The iPhone has received recent remakes of the  classic cyberpunk adventure Beneath a Steel Sky where every line of dialogue is acted out and spoken. Take that Dragon Age!

A couple of years ago I was happy to hear Larry was returning. I was very excited when I heard Team 17 now had the license. Team 17 released some of my all time favourite games on the Amiga - Alien Breed, Project X and Superfrog  - so I began to have some hopes it would be a good comeback.

Alarm bells started ringing when I heard Team 17 were eschewing the recent uprising in point n click episodic re-release in favour of a  more commercial sandbox environment. When I finally got my hands on it these fears were confirmed.

Box Office Bust jumps into the current day a where ageing lovable  lothario Larry has retired and past the Leisure suit on to his nephew.  A more annoying oink would be difficult to imagine. The characters are  empty soulless caricatures with none of the charm of the original  games. The imaginative and occasionally fiendish puzzles being  reduced to a handful of shovel-ware wii mini-games. I tolerated this  affront to Larrys good name for a few hours before my inner fanboy  begged me to stop.

Box Office Bust holds none of the subtle wit, emotional baggage or sheer desperation that made Larry so lovable, or most importantly funny. See, that's where the old point n clickers shone. They could dazzle with neither graphics or gameplay so relied on one of the hardest things to nail in gaming, humour. For that they should be celebrated and studied by today's studios and gamers alike.

Iain

       

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