‘Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude’Genre: AdventurePlatform: PC, Xbox, PlayStation2Cost: $29.99Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

‘The Guy Game’Genre: Game ShowPlatform: Xbox, PlayStation2Cost: $39.98Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Apparently taking a hint from SpikeTV and Maxim Magazine, video game publishers have taken the trashy route to catch the attention of its aging male audience.

With the recent releases ‘Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude’ and ‘The Guy Game,’ publishers are hoping to create a niche within the market of college-aged male gamers by producing games that focus on what they believe to be at the forefront of this audience’s mind: naked women.

In ‘Leisure Suit Larry,’ gamers take on the task of helping their nerdy hero bed far more attractive counterparts. While the concept is sexist, vulgar and trite, it also intrigues curious gamers. But after just a few mere minutes of playing this game, the novelty wears off and the game can be seen for what it really is: a compilation of smaller games – ones that aren’t very difficult or entertaining – that are very similar to a number of the Flash games that can be found on the Internet, on Web sites like AddictingGames.com. ‘Leisure Suit Larry’ also fails because it takes too many of these games to win over a target’s affection, leading gamers to often lose interest before getting the girl.

‘The Guy Game’ is little more than a Spring Break version of ‘Street Smarts,’ a TV game show that asks random questions to random people and has in-studio contestants guess as to whether or not the answers will be correct. Not realizing that this formula barely works for the show, Take Two Interactive decided to produce a video game that essentially does the same thing, with two exceptions: the people being asked the questions are young, supple women vacationing on Spring Break, and the repercussion for answering incorrectly is being forced to flash the camera.

‘The Guy Game’ attempts to turn this format into a drinking game by asking losing contestants to drink and winning ones to create a rule for the rest of the game, a la the popular playing card drinking games ‘Kings’ and ‘Asshole.’

Where ‘The Guy Game’ immediately tops ‘Leisure Suit Larry’ is in the fact that its women are real, and not animated. Still, while both games fail miserably, ‘The Guy Game’s’ drinking aspect somehow makes it more palatable – perhaps because, over the course of playing the game, players become too inebriated to remember that they just blew 40 bucks on it.

The only redemption in buying these games is the story players will later be able to tell their friends about how they were forced to prove they were over 18 years of age before any sale could be finalized. But an ID isn’t the only thing people will want to remember when heading out to buy either of these games. They’ll also need to ask for a receipt so they can return it later that day after they’ve inevitably been disappointed.

Published on October 31, 2004 at 12:00 pm