Level Up: Luigi's Mansion

By the way, you may notice the rest of the October games seem to have a theme...


When the Nintendo GameCube came out, it needed some good games to start off on the right foot. Luigi’s Mansion did just that. Coming out as a launch title for the system, it sold over 2.5 Million copies, became the first game to be rereleased as a player’s choice title and was the 5^th best selling GameCube game in the United States. It was a truly fun game that really made its mark on the system...

“Kanye West”: *Interrupting* Sorry Leo, I really did like Luigi’s Mansion, and Imma let you finish, but Super Smash Brothers Melee was the best GameCube game of all time!

Riiiiiight... Anyways, the game plot was classic Mario style, in the sense that someone was captured and you have to save them. The big difference is that its Mario captured this time! This made Luigi have to be the hero for the first time (unless you count Mario is Missing as a game, which I DON’T!). The game actually starts with Luigi arriving at his Mansion which he won in a contest he never actually entered (sounds like junk mail to me). He enters it to see it’s not the dream mansion he expected; it’s run down and ghost infested! Professor Elvin Gadd (E. Gadd for short) then appears on scene to teach Luigi how to capture ghost using a flashlight and a vacuum the professor calls the Poltergust 3000. E Gadd also informs Luigi that he saw Mario go in, but didn’t see him come out or inside the mansion.

I think this is what makes the game so good: our unlikely hero and the games atmosphere. Luigi has never really been much of an adventurer on his own, and only ever gets coaxed into it when either dragged along by his brother (Mario & Luigi series) or when Mario is unavailable. While in the house, he’s always looking around and whistling to himself and he always jumps a bit when something pops up. But he has good reason to be scared since he’s in a huge ghost filled mansion with most rooms only being lighted by his flashlight. I know most of you will be like “oh, it’s not all that scary”, but once you start putting yourself in the shoes of the character, the place starts getting to you.

Onto the game play. The biggest aspect is capturing ghosts. To capture a ghost, you shine a light on them, and then suck them up with the Poltergust 3000 when their hit points show up. I was surprised at how easy this was to master. In most rooms (except for maybe 5) there are also portrait Ghosts, called that since they originate and will be returned into painting. They have 100 hit points and are never as simple as the others. You’ll need to use your surroundings and what you know of the ghosts to expose their weak points and suck them up. One of my favorites is Mr.Luggs, a glutton who ate himself to death and continues to eat. You have to suck up his food from the table and stop the butler ghosts from serving him more to expose his week point. As you can see, the puzzles are rarely hard and should be no problem for the veteran adventure gamer.

There’s quite a bit of optional things in the mansion too. First off, some of the ghosts are optional; you don’t even need to see and others you can just pass by. Another optional aspect are the boos. These are ghosts that hide in a room after you turn the light on (which you do by getting rid of all the other ghosts). When you do find them, you can try to capture them, put they can go through walls, unlike other ghosts, so they can be a little tricky and annoying. Finally, there’s also money in this game. You find money everywhere: in vases, behind pictures, ghosts drop some... Everywhere! At the end of the game, how much money you collect determines your grade (A being the best grade possible, going all the way down to H). Getting the A grade means having to pretty much go through every nook and cranny through the house: defeating all the ghosts, finding secret rooms and catching all the boos. This adds that extra little touch to the game that really makes you want to search the mansion high and low.

Luigi’s Mansion is a fun game with great puzzles and so many secrets and can be a great light scare if you let it. If you have a GameCube and have not played this game, you are missing out.