Nintendo were kind enough to give this GameCube game out to people who pay for the top tier of their online subscription service. Back when it originally came out – at the GameCube’s launch – it was perceived to be a disappointment. Indeed, I eschewed it in favour of Super Monkey Ball and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 because it wasn’t the follow-up to Super Mario 64 we all hoped was happening. Of course, I did eventually play it and yes, it turns out it was great after all. But still very different to a Mario game.
Another complaint levelled at it at the time was the length. Nintendo had reportedly “done some research” and found that people wanted “shorter games”. Luigi’s Mansion is, by modern standards, pretty short at about 5 or 6 hours, but that’s still plenty long enough as far as I’m concerned.
Now, some twenty-something years later, how does it stand up?
Perfectly, it turns out. Nintendo’s art still looks great now, even though it’s all 4:3 and SD and running on a toaster. The gameplay is as great as it ever was, and very little has actually aged. One thing that has, I found, is I could not longer control it with the default “invert Y” setting. Why this is, I don’t know. Maybe in time I’ll be unable to cope with anything but the definitely backwards “natural scrolling” mouse/trackpad setting that computer operating systems default to these days. Sad times if so. Anyway, with the Y setting changed I was away.
Everyone knows how to play Luigi’s Mansion – find ghosts, scan their weaknesses, suck ’em up – so I won’t spend time on that. Needless to say, it’s still fun. Luigi’s Mansion 3 obviously improved so many areas of the game (such as everything being more interactive – here Luigi just grinds up against most things going “unngh unngh oohyeah”) but the core mechanics are still sound.
One negative I have, which presumably I had originally but my diary doesn’t go back that far, is the Boo chasing. To properly complete the game you have to find 50 hidden Boos, one in most rooms, and when you do they float off and you have to suck them up. Unfortunately, they have a tendency to escape the hoover and fly through walls. Chasing them when they do this is a bit tedious, but there are some that run off to rooms that although next door, can only be accessed via a full loop of the mansion so it takes ages – especially as they tend to escape again back to where they came from.
That’s all though. Everything else is excellent.
