Hey, DH here. If you don't know, I'm the local GameCube Guru and resident HTML...person. Seeing as this is the first GCN game ever made, it's natural that I would review it! But I have heard, with sucky games come sucky reviews...
Whenever Nintendo releases a new system, they always have a Mario release game. Unfortunately, you'll see what I mean by that later, Mario is nowhere in sight for the Gamecube release. Instead, we get stuck with Luigi's Mansion. Oh, and you'll see what I mean by stuck.
The plot is very very basic. Luigi, the lesser Mario brother, wins a mansion in a contest he doesn't even remember entering. When he gets there, however, he finds out that it's, well, overrun by ghosts. They come to attack him, but before they get a chance, a tiny little man wearing a vacuum cleaner sucks the ghosts up. It turns out that he is a scientist from the shack convienently located just outside the mansion grounds, and he tells you that he saw Mario enter the mansion hours ago and never came out. Armed with the cleverly named PolterGust 3000 vacuum cleaner, it is Luigi's job to get to the inner sanctum of the mansion and save Mario!
The music is really just one song that eerily plays in the background as you explore the mansion. Cool as it sounds, it gets repetative as you wander about. When you walk into a lit room, Luigi nervously hums or whistles the hypnotic tune. The other music is also pretty much the same thing, but you probably won't notice it too much. The SFX are pretty good, but don't set and standards for the GameCube.
The control is very easy to pick up on, but does take time to have down pat. The B button controls your flashlight, the A button examines/shakes objects, the R button controls the PolterGust (the further you depress the button, the harder the vacuum sucks), and the X, Y, and Z buttons bring up your Game Boy Horror, with which you can look around the room, bring up a map, and pull up your item inventory. The replay value for this game is very low. After you complete the game, you can replay it with some of the items and ghosts supposedly in new locations, though the difference is barely noticable (to me at least!).
