Could Leisure Suit Larry be made today?

It was and it didn't get very good reviews.

>>3370789
I think something similar could be made, but it'd just be very different.

It's very much a product of the author's personality and imagination, not just of it's time (although it certainly was that too)

>>3370791
If you're talking Magna Cum Laude, wasn't that like, over a decade ago? Unless they made a new one.

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The remake of 1 wasn't bad, but it wasn't that great either.

The only good Larrys are 1, 6, and 7.

>>3370828
No I'm talking about reloaded.

>Al Lowe's website is still up
http://allowe.com/

>>3370859
Why the hell did they use the awful VGA remake interface instead of the amazing 7 interface?

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>>3370886
7's the ideal Larry for me too.

>>3370789
No, because feminism and SJW.

>>3370791
Thank feminism.

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Sure, why not?

This game is based too much on 80s-early 90s cultural stereotypes to work today.

>>3370841
6 had fantastic girls

>>3371130
good point, it's quite tied to its era. Nothing wrong with that, but anything trying to do Larry today either would feel very off, or like a bad stereotype.
Unless you pull an Austin Powers or something.

>>3370789
>today
Not retro!!!1

It's easy to blame feminism for everything, but I think in the case of Larry it would indeed be difficult to make a game like that work in the present culture. Larry is a caricature of a failed macho. It worked, because that kind of culture was at least acknowledge in some form, even if (or especially because) it was laughed at, Larry got chuckles for his ego and his body and luck being so thoroughly out of sync. In modern culture though, it's way too common to read deep things into even simple and inoffensive humor, Larry is perceived not as a joke but as a statement. That completely destroys any vibe a Larry game could have.
The old Larry games work, because they're a product of their time, and a player playing them can acknowledge and appreciate it in that context. I don't mean it aged badly. Compare it to something like Miami Vice. It's unapologetic about the era it's in, and the style it's dealing with, but it would seem terribly out of place in a modern aesthetic. Within its context though, it's brilliant.
As for Magna Cum Laude, it wasn't much of a Larry game. It was a cash-in. Larry, despite his own dim wit, was a mentally challenging game, and the sexuality in it was teasing and often subverted. Magna Cum Laude was too dumb and aggressive about it, completely oblivious to what made Larry work.
Remakes of the old games are not necessarily new games, and indeed these games translate the Larry typical aesthetic and attitude only on a technological level. They do not change the era it's in, the setting, or anything like that. They can't.

>>3371251
>Victorian Principles
>Elizabethan Attitudes
>Georgian Crescents
>Plus Alexei Sayle as Joan Collins

>>3371624
Look at Glenn Quagmire today - basically the same archetype.

>>3371625
seen the names of the Larry 6 girls?

>>3371627
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFHO6TWntVA

30 sec.

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>>3371139
>>3371615
For fuck's sake. I really don't need the idiocy from /v/ in here.

>>3371624
Personally I think it's more of Al Lowe losing his touch rather than the series being outdated and the art direction for reloaded just being awful in general.

>>3371631
>I think it's more of Al Lowe losing his touch
I'd agree, I think

>the series being outdated
just to clarify, I did not suggest it's outdated. Just that it's tied closely to its era. You can do a hippie themed story in the present, but it's just not the same as in the late 60s, you know? Kind of the same thing with Larry.

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>>3371634
i'm not, you silly negro. use your brain, your complaints are just inane nonsense that you're repeat from your /v/ermin peers rather than knowing anything about the product or the reason for it's lukewarm reaction to reloaded..

>>3371635
Oh, I''m getting what you're saying.

>>3370789
>>3371624
Sounds like you could make a modern Larry if you just made him a failed PUA

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>>3370789
No, unfortunately. They remade Larry 1 and reviewers all shat on it for being sexist and what have you. I don't know why the video game industry is so filled with such a huge amount of pussies.

>that user score vs critic score
Lol

>>3371106
I hardly think they'd be able to stop it from happening.

Some publishers would shy away from it, sure, but others wouldn't because they know there's a counter culture to that which will latch on to it.

It's like how feminists latched on to the new Ghostbusters because Sony created a made up narrative about sexism, it's not good, and it hasn't got good reception, but it's made.
On the flipside, you have a game like Hatred, which got SJWs riled up, but people who really hate SJWs latched onto it, it's not that amazing, the reception was lukewarm, but it was made.

There isn't anything that actually stops you from reaching an audience in this day and age besides your ability to produce a work.
If it's good or interesting, people will notice it, the bitchleft doesn't have infinite power and you shouldn't fool yourself into thinking they do.

If you make an adventure game centered around sex and humor today, someone might get mad, sure (hell, their outrage can help advertise your product), but if it's actually good, people will still notice it (provided you put it out there).

>>3371106
>the post 7 games got a bad reception because of feminism, not because they were hot garbage

>>3371130
Well obviously, but there's no reason you couldn't make a sex adventure game today, it'd just be different.

>>3371692
Actually, that'd probably work, part of the story could be for the character to stop being a faggot and instead learn how to become more of a real ladies man, rather than a douche in a fedora (of course, it wouldn't be smooth sailing even after improving as a person, you need that farce element).

>>3371692
>Sounds like you could make a modern Larry if you just made him a failed PUA
Good idea actually.

>>3370859
I played it for like 5 minutes, shitty cash in. Would rather go back and play the EGA version again.

They should remake 4. That was the best one.

>>3371947
Seconding.

>>3371837
Second this. It's definitely not impossible or even harder to release a product nowadays. You just got to have the balls to make it happen and let the people know. Being lucky also helps.

>>3372001
>It's definitely not impossible or even harder to release a product nowadays.
If anything it's easier than ever due to the massive potential exposure you can get on the internet.

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We couldn't have just had a fucking Larry thread, could we?

>>3372150
ignore the idiots and talk Larry

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>>3372150
The cancer has won, it looks like the golden years of arguing about video games on the internet are over. We are fading into obscurity and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it. Soon both you and I will stop existing entirely. Maybe we should just give up video games forever.

they make porn games all the time

>>3373471
Larry was sleazy but not porn. At least not until Magna Cum Laude

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>>3373489
have you seen steam's front page any time the last month? half of it are VNs that are 1 patch away from having full on H-scenes

>>3373492
>have you seen steam's front page any time the last month?
I don't use steam

>half of it are VNs that are 1 patch away from having full on H-scenes
what does that have to do with Larry?

>>3373494
OP's question

there's no reason you couldn't make a sex game in 2016 there's a thousand times as many as there used to be

>>3373502
none of these have the traction or mass appeal of Larry, do they? I don't know, Larry and these games, seems kind of like different things

>>3373507
That's just a matter of public tastes changing. Larry was VERY much a product of its era. Its style of humor and really everything else about it are of a different era - particularly the whole "bawdy sexy comedic romp about a lovable(?) loser on a mission to score" is a relic that was dying even in the 90s, and is now outdated in much the same way as Charlie Chaplin doing that thing with his eyebrows (which I understand was considered pretty funny back in his day).

Plus, on the subject of different eras with different tastes, there's the fact that adventure games are a niche genre at best now.

>>3373526
>there's the fact that adventure games are a niche genre at best now
I blame publishers and developers more for that than I blame the audience. There are barely any such games available nowadays, so the audience doesn't know what they're missing. These games just require a lot of development work with little gain. A clean playthrough can be a couple hours at best, but you need to spend so much time developing the unique animations, unique locations and most of all, logically sane puzzles. They are not very cost effective.

>>3373507
>none of these have the traction or mass appeal of Larry, do they?
Considering those are dating sims and VNs with the focus being porn and then maybe romance, and that LSL is a cartoony farce/adventure that puts a lot of weight on comedy and raunchiness, I'd say they're a bit different.

Once again, I think a fun sex adventure game could absolutely be made today, it just has to be good.

>>3373526
Well...the game is pretty much rooted in sex/dating/hookup culture as it existed in the 80s. It's not anything like that today.

>>3373538
>it just has to be good
that's an important bit, more so for such a game than for others

>>3373507
HuniePop is widely popular

>>3373539
Well yeah, product of it's time.

A modern sex adventure would just have to have it's basis in contemporary sex and hookup culture, there's a lot of things you can make fun of today, or turn into an entertaining farce.

>>3371740
Wasn't all that bad but what killed it for was the placement of the Kickstarter people. Almost every room was filled with them. Most just standing there. I.e. at the Casino, instead of placing them at slots or card table and interacting with them that way, they stand in middle of the room. Its like they didn't give a shit and threw them in there without consideration of design.

>>3374362
Isn't it like partially based on Al Lowe as he would have figured himself if he were a ladies man in his youth, except subverted and turned into a screwball comedy?

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>>3373526
>public tastes
IMO, most of the time this is used as a scapegoat for devs that deliver underwhelming products (I- I'd rather have DNF still being a running joke ;_;).

>>3373539
>It's not anything like that today.
If I could drawfag I'd make Larry using tinder or something.

How would *you* make a modern larry anyway /vr/?
Telltale style? VN style with some resource management like True Love? FPS about SOF OPERATING OPERATOR Col. Larry "Leisure Suit" Laffer?

>>3374530
Point and click adventure in a pseudo SCUMM style maybe.

Maybe a text parser for some things and some humor

>>3374536
Also, I'd add that I wouldn't make it a Larry game, I think his story is pretty much done, like, making a new story about him now would feel more needlessly exploitative than ever.

I'd rather just do something brand new from the ground up.
An idea I have is to have three selectable player characters, each is a higher difficulty than the next

>>3375196
>easy mode: shy and timid beta male, 30 year old virgin, he's not really a bad person, he just don't get how to talk to women, at all, has been friendzoned at least twice, his goal is to learn how to talk to women, build confidence and of course, find a girl

>normal mode: the failed pickup artist, he desperately wants to get laid and have an active sexlife, but because he bases his tactics on trying to undermine a girl's confidence (without knowing a good way to actually do that), he doesn't score, his goal is to learn how to become a suave smoothtalker and a real ladies' man, who chicks actually DO want to fuck, one of his late game bad ends involves him scoring with a girl, but she has an STD which makes his balls explode, as a callback to LSL, this can be avoided by either declining her or using a condom

>hard mode: the fedora neckbeard, chubby guy who's the epitome of /r9k/ and r/mgtow, has legit issues with women, doesn't score because he dresses like an autist, doesn't shave, doesn't look people in the eyes, and "subtly" try to redpill girls whenever he actually talks to them, his would be different story, he finds a girl right away (say, at work, new employee or customer) who he falls madly in love with (perhaps she's the first woman who really impressed him, and he doesn't know exactly what to do with that), problem is, she rejects him for being the creep he is, and for once in his life, he has to stop and reevaluate himself, his goal is to come to terms with some personal issues, work on his appearance (shave, burn his fedora in a trashcan), learn how to look people in the eyes, try to actually understand women (and real people in general), and in general do some soul searching, the best end for him is that he actually becomes a better person, and gets the girl, the good end is that he's become a better person, but she rejects him (bittersweet), this would be a substantially longer playthrough than easy or normal

>>3373492
>tank dating simulator

>>3375223
I'm guessing it's playing on the popularity of Gurls ünd Panzer

A LSL game would never stand a chance today. Like someone said earlier, that stick of romcom romp is dead in the water. Also kids today grew up with anime or pseudo-anime, with the tropes of yandre, tsudanare etc etc not to mention third-wave feminism poisoning the well of having the girls be sexy or interesting.

Plus it having western anime style would never sell.

If Hollywood still makes raunchy sex comedies then Leisure Suit Larry could still work today.

It just needs the right approach.

Of course, it you will always have feminine nu-male gaming critics railing against it. Game critics weren't exactly openly celebrating Leisure Suit Larry when 7 came out. I think Gamespot gave it 6/10.

If I was making Leisure Suit Larry 8, I would approach it like this:

Start out as Larry before he dons the leisure suit. Larry did have an origin story in the manual of the first game. He was a nerdy computer salesman who lived with his mother until he turned 40.

I think there's a lot of potential there to tap into awkward comedy that fits well with the character like Larry Laffer.

The opening moments of the game have you losing your job, your family and your home. The only thing you have is a severance package.

Now, the trick is explaining why Larry would wear a leisure suit in 2016. I suggest giving Larry a mentor whether it's memories of his father, who was successful with women in the '70s, or some sleazy Internet PUA.

Larry is always going back to this mentor's advice on how to be, what is essentially, an alpha male. The joke is the advice is extremely dated and the women you try to pick up take advantage of this in order to get you to do their bidding.

I'm also toying with this idea that the final girl is a former co-worker who is using you to get back at the CEO that fired everyone in the first place.

This could be really self-aware as this situation sort of happened with Sierra On-Line anyway - Sierra was bought out by corporate criminals who bullied the original CEO into stepping down and then closed down their studios.

>>3370789
there's a doom mod where you fuck demons inna ass.

this is the future, bro. anything can be made if people want it so.

People would like to easily blame the MUH FEMINISM angle towards this whole thing, and less over the fact that the whole Adventure Game genre is deader than it was before.

Broken Age revived and killed it in one fell swoop. The Day of the Tentacle Remaster bombed pretty hard. I just think all of us have these rose shaded goggles over what we think point and clicks were like compared to the actual reality.

>>3375542
Adventure games and its fans refuse to evolve.

Where are the immersive real time first person adventure games? Games like Gone Home, Ether, Vanishing of Ethan Carter and Everyone Has Gone to the Rapture feel dead and empty.

Action games feel more immersive and often have better stories than today's point and click titles.

>>3375737
>Where are the immersive real time first person adventure games?
why do you need adventures to be immersive, real-time and first person? You're looking for a different genre

>>3375394
>Like someone said earlier, that stick of romcom romp is dead in the water

Well of course you're not going to use 1988's cultural stereotypes in 2016.

>>3375761
Not him, but I think his point is these single player indie games try too hard to be impressive when adventure games have a good art direction and setting enough for it to be immersive. It's like trying really hard for a video game to be art instead of letting people decide on their own if it is or isn't. Kind of hard to explain, but I'll just throw in Icofor good measure.

>>3375776
>try too hard to be impressive
never got that vibe. They're needlessly artsy and angsty, with very little substance

>It's like trying really hard for a video game to be art
they are art, these particular games, anyway. Shit games, but definitely art, as they are made with completely artistic intentions

>>3371692
Yeah, I can see that. Larry as a personal couch/pua/con man failure wearing a fedora.

>>3375542
>The Day of the Tentacle Remaster bombed pretty hard

Cripes. Whoever thought that was a good idea? You could not find a game that's dated worse or is more a product of its time than DOTT.

>>3375784
I never played DOTT, what makes it dated, how was it good then but the remake is awful?

Remakes work some of the time, not always. The X-COM remakes worked great even though UFO Defense is very much rooted in the 90s alien fad. The Larry and DOTT remakes though were just doomed to fail for many reasons.

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>>3375789
>I never played DOTT, what makes it dated
The entire thing is nothing but early 90s pop culture jokes taken to the max. Also the art style, wow is that dated.

>>3375790
how much of a remake is x-com even? Seems very different. And what are the reasons these other things are doomed to fail?

>>3375794
>>3375790
Not a fair comparison. X-COM is mostly about the gameplay and strategy, not jokes about 80s metalheads or pocket protector geeks like in LucasArts adventures, also adventure games are not randomly generated like a strategy title so once you beat them there's no reason to touch the thing again.

Also of course the X-COM remakes fixed the vast number of bugs and programming oversights in the original games.

Maybe adventure games should concentrate on new titles instead of reliving past glories.

>>3375819
the whole modern industry is about reliving past glories. Just sequels and remakes, and re-using the same crude gameplay over and over

>>3375794
XCOM's gameplay got streamlined so it could be enjoyed by a broader audience.

>>3375394
>the well of having the girls be sexy or interesting
The anime culture you mentioned earlier did it's thing too in this manner. Japanese culture is very conservative, and sure, it's full of animated porn, but for anime to treat sex as something normal? Unthinkable.
In anime girls are always either untouchable maidens or sluts, and guys are exclusively perverts.
So what I'm trying to say is that you can't make a game that's a parody of pop culture take on dating and sex life, when that doesn't exist. At least in anime.

>>3375508
those ideas are actually good

>>3375830
>just sequels and remakes

King's Quest I, II, III, IV, V, VI, plus that SCI remake of I.

>implying it's never not been like that

>>3375830
You can't jew-physics this. Everything will always be re-using what was previously a success. You can't reinvent the wheel every time you make a game, you just need to differentiate it a bit and add your own flavour.

>>3375849
>You can't reinvent the wheel every time you make a game, you just need to differentiate it a bit and add your own flavour.
point of a remake is to not even do that, but instead just take something already made and do the nucreative chore of upgrading it. Also, existing IP.

You're trying to sugar coat it by explaining to me the creative process. That only works if these games were creative. They're designed, intentionally, to be as derivative as possible. That's the problem.

>>3370841
4 was the bestest

>>3375854
>point of a remake is to not even do that, but instead just take something already made and do the nucreative chore of upgrading it.
You pretty much repeated what I said. This generalisation makes you sound like a "90's kid".

>>3375836
>In anime girls are always either untouchable maidens or sluts, and guys are exclusively perverts.
Japan loves their stereotypes and archetypes.

>>3371837
This guy gets it.

>>3375198

>very hard mode: you play as an impulsive serial murderer-rapist sociopath that has absolutely zero self-control. You have rather average experience with women. However, your OCD causes you to only want to talk to women that are at least more attractive than your previous victim. Your goal is to find a date in a week for your parents get-together, so your mom finally gets off your back about finding a girl and settling down and having a family... without having any authorities alerted or giving into impulsive behaviors.

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>>3377846
Honestly, I think basically having an expy of Patrick Bateman would be much funnier.

Like, it's the joke difficulty:
>throughout his arc he 'kills' each of the other player characters
>his violent delusions gets more grandiose and absurd
>towards the end of his story he sees people on the street or at work he 'knows' he murdered (like does double-takes and starts sweating nervously)
>realizes by the end that he's completely delusional and fucked up and has himself committed (at least, his good end)

It'd have to feature the fucking overconfident and weird yuppie personality of Patrick Bateman too, and the violence would be cartoony as hell

>>3375198
Kinda reminds me of the Karateka remake where their approach to difficulty was to replace the player character with a stronger one every time he died so you had to git gud to get the good ending (default chara).

>>3378246
Oh right, and as the other player characters you have the chance to meet him, and he's sort of weird and offputting.

While in his playthrough and perspective, he has the opportunity to kill them each in some bizarre way, when playing as the other characters you see him kind of zone out with a blank stare and make unintelligible mumbling as your character just ends the conversation and moves on.

His best end would be that he meets a female inmate or nurse at a privately funded mental hospital who takes a liking to him.

>>3375874
I bet these millenials never even played 4