Playing Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust makes us feel old. With an opening cut-scene featuring a cartoon character surrounded by cartoon pornography, and opening dialogue that shunts in an expletive as quickly as it possibly good, there's little doubt what you're getting into here. But it all feels barely above the level of a 13 year-old, and not in a good way.

Now let's be clear: we like a bit of how's your father as much as anyone else, and we're as capable of accessing 'art movies' as the British Home Secretary's husband. And last time we checked, we didn't have a regular order for the Daily Mail, either.

But there's a tawdry smut to Leisure Suit Larry's latest outing that fails to sit alongside an interesting game. Thus, it goes for cheap gags. Even that in itself would be forgivable if said cheap gags were funny. But they're not. And the end result is a fairly poor mishmash of some not very good ideas, with some of the worst comedy to grace a modern day videogame. And we like a good knob gag as much as anyone.

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The earlier Leisure Suit Larry games at least had charm to them, and were incidentally based on the same engine that used to power the Police Quest games. But the evolution of gaming technology hasn't been kind to the series, with the last - Magne Cum Laude - arguably its nadir to date. For this latest game, Team 17 was drafted in on coding duties, and what this undeniably talented group of developers has put together is as poor a game as we've played all year.

The basic plot sees you as Larry Lovage, who heads off to his Uncle Larry's movie studio. But what's this? As Larry the Younger goes off tackling tedious mini-games and traipsing round the studio, it becomes clear that there's a mole in the organisation, and your job is to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Thus, you arrive on the movie studio lot that you're free to explore, although there's a narrative that you need to follow and things you need to do in order to keep the plot moving. The cartoony graphics are bright enough - even if the amply-endowed women look like mutated creatures from another world - and you soon get down to work.

Which is when things go wrong. The mini-games themselves are of variably quality, but the shoddy camera angles and horribly unfair leaps of faith between platforms soon kick in, and your anger rises. You get to have stilted conversations with other characters and there are seduction missions too.

It's really not much fun at all. There's an attempt to lift the game by employing a really quite impressive voice cast - Shannon Elizabeth and Carmen Electra alone probably ate up a good chunk of the game's budget - but it's simply not enough.

The problem, sadly, is that the jokes aren't very funny, the game mechanism is annoying and, most damningly of all, it's just not very good to play. Sorry, Larry, but on the evidence of Box Office Bust your best days are a long, long way behind you.

An uncommitted attempt to rejuvenate a flagging franchise. Box Office Bust isn't funny, rarely entertains and is, at best, really quite annoying. It might just be time to call it a day.