Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust

It feels endless. Larry runs around the same old places, fulfilling mission objectives which are minor variations on the familiar theme of "Go and get a thing and bring it back here." The closest the game ever gets to entertaining is the package delivery mission where you get to drive the post truck; the handling is pathetic but at least you don't have to watch Larry's stupid running animation. Incidentally, when he does get out of the truck and runs into the building you don't see him carrying the package, oh no; it just magically appears in the cut-scene. Then, when you leave the building, the truck will have magically disappeared, presumably to the same place the parcel came from.

That's if you can leave. When you're inside buildings the camera is fixed, often in a stupid position. This leads to Larry getting stuck behind bits of scenery or unable to enter rooms for reasons you cannot see. You can control the camera when you're outside, but you won't want to; there's nothing to see but poorly rendered buildings, terrible textures, hilarious pixellisation and tearing.

In cut-scenes many of the characters are afflicted with a strange disease, which speckles their skin with luminous grains, and they all have frightening teeth that appear to be individually lit from within. There are even weirder characters wandering around the sparsely populated streets - some of them don't have facial features until they're a few feet away from you, at which point their nose, mouth and eyes pop out of nowhere. The game box informs us Box Office Bust was built with "Unreal Technology".

It's not even worth addressing the issue of whether Leisure Suit Larry is sexist. It's impossible to care. It's certainly not sexy. At least the terrible Lula 3D had actual tits and sex in. This game just has clothed women with beachballs stuffed down their tops and the kind of innuendo that hasn't been seen since the Carry On films, which they haven't made since 1978 for a reason. (Yes all right Carry On Columbus but everyone knows that doesn't count and should be locked away in a concrete bunker to be forgotten for the rest of time along with fascism, dreadlocks on white people and Box Office Bust.)

Let's review some of the words used in this article: hateful, toss, stupid, tedious, terrible, dreadful, pathetic. That about sums it up, but just to be clear: do not buy this game. You will not only want your money back, you will want reimbursement for the electricity consumed by your Xbox 360 in the six minutes it took to realise you had made a horrible mistake. It's impossible to understand why Codemasters plucked this from the rubble of the Vivendi-Activision merger, like a shellshocked Blitz victim retrieving the dead cat instead of the family jewels.