Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust is an Action-Adventure game developed by Team17 and published by Codemasters. It was released on March 31, 2009 for PC and Xbox 360, then ported to PS3 on May 5th, 2009. It's the eighth instalment in the Leisure Suit Larry series, and the second one to star Larry Lovage (after Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude).
After graduating from college, Larry Lovage finds himself helping his uncle Larry Laffer at his film company, Laffer Studios, by doing miscellaneous tasks and trying to uncover a mole from a rival studio who is attempting to sabotage Laffer.
Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust provides examples of the following tropes:
- All Crimes Are Equal: Studio security will chase Larry with equal effort regardless of whether he had been trying (in vain) to intentionally drive over people, or simply failed to deliver an item to an exec in time.
- Apathetic Citizens: The people on the set pay little attention to anything Larry does. Most egregiously, he can hijack the golf carts moving back and forth around the studio Grand Theft Auto-style... except that instead of the driver getting thrown out, they simply move over to the passenger seat and let Larry drive whenever he wants, with zero arguments on their part.
- Car Fu: Averted. You can end up driving over the people on the set as many times as you like, but they'll always recover with no injuries a few seconds after getting knocked down.
- Double Jump: Larry can jump in the air to gain extra height.
- Fetch Quest: Many of the game's activities consist of driving or walking on foot to deliver items, especially in the early game.
- Genre Shift: Most of the games in the series have been pretty traditional Point-and-Click adventure games as far as their gameplay was concerned. Box Office Bust is instead fully 3D and is an open-world to boot.
- Level-Map Display: There's a small map of the level displayed in the bottom right corner.
- The Mole: The main goal is finding a mole from a rival studio who is attempting to sabotage Laffer Studios. When Larry Laffer explains it to his nephew Lovage, the latter thinks he's talking about an actual mole.
- Press X to Not Die: Directing scenes is represented as a series of QTEs.
- Timed Mission: Most of the fetch quest missions are not timed, but a few of them are. If you let the timer run out, Larry will get chased by the studio security and thrown into the studio's jail.
- Unexpected Gameplay Change: Larry's daydreams, where he acts out his fantasies of starring in the nearby productions, which are represented by the platforming or shoot-em-up minigames.
