As old as some retro games seem, none are as tragically aged and irrelevant as the Leisure Suit Larry franchise. The entire point of the game in the eighties was to get to see some sexy pixilated women while trying to hide the fact that you were playing it, from your parents. With the newest game you will want to hide the fact you are playing it from your friends to avoid the shame of playing something so jaw-droppingly terrible. You play the role of Larry's porn-obsessed nephew, also named Larry. Box Office Bust opens with Larry Lovage receiving a call from his now-famous uncle, now in charge of his own porn film studio. Uncle Larry is afraid there is a mole working to sink his studio. You take on low-level jobs in the studio, like delivering mail, to gather information in an effort to root out the mole. Outside of the bland plot, you realize who the mole is the moment you see them and are left wondering why nobody else in the company can seem to figure it out.
Handling the menial tasks throughout the studio portions of Box Office Bust would be bad enough, but the general gameplay is just horrible. The Leisure Suit Larry games used to be all about sweet-talking your way into a pixilated woman's pants, but now they throw in platformer, shooter, and single-button brawler elements too. There is still a seduction mini-game, though they dumb it down so that even your dog could get little Larry some action by allowing you to keep trying the four responses with the woman until you get it right. Making your way through the studio on the poorly handling mail cart is almost as much of a pain as the tiresome wall jumps required to retrieve wayward script pages. The strange inclusion of double jumps is trumped by the decision to take away the camera controls when you need them the most. Most times, you can move the camera angles as you see fit, but when inside buildings or hanging from ledges and trying to get a glimpse of where you will land, the camera refuses to budge. Many of the platforming portions even include a timer, for some artificial difficulty. The first mission where you run short on time and cannot see your jumping angles is probably as far as most gamers will go with this one.
Genre-specific dreamscapes, found at the base of movie billboards, help to offer up some additional variety in gameplay and story, but none of it is any good. Traveling around the studio is a chore, and typically requires you to wander around on foot; since mail carts conveniently disappear mid-mission when the task does not require driving. Missions generally require you to go from point A to point B, watch a bad cut-scene, and then head back to point A. There is a directing mini-game, putting young Larry behind the lens, but it is nothing more than selecting the best of the three camera angles for the movie's dialogue scenes. The studio does serve as a bit of an open world, but does not actually allow you to choose your next mission until around the halfway point of the story. There are collectable Larry trophies scattered around the studio to keep you busy, but it is unlikely you will want to play through the story, let alone go back for more. Strangely, the game does manage to pull in some fantastic voice talent.
Comedians Dave Attel and Artie Lang join actors Jeffrey Tambor, Jay Mohr, and Patrick Warburton for a talented cast that has a pathetically uninspired script to work with. The jokes are the kind of things that might get a light chuckle out of grade-schoolers, let alone adults - the supposed target audience. To be fair, there are quite a few jokes where they censor names for legal reasons. It is a strange decision, given how edgy the game wants to be, and the bleeps are so frequent that it seems lazy to have not written something else in their place. There is too much talent, with too rich of source material, for things to have gone this badly. The game wants to be racy, but come off amateurish. There are sexier situations and racier comedy on network TV at this point. In addition to all else that falls miserably short of even the low expectations of the game, it is one of the most atrocious looking games around. The horrific art style is only half the problem, as the graphics themselves are hands-down the worst the system has seen. These are some of the ugliest 'sexy' women you have ever seen.
To be completely honest and brutal, there is nothing to like about Box Office Bust. It is hard to find any game that is completely worthless, but this is thankfully one of a kind. The game wants to be offensively funny, but comes off as offensively bad instead. We can't come up with a single reason to recommend purchasing Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust other than the fact that it is a bit different from most other games out there, even so avoid with all costs.
