Luigi’s Mansion – Game of the week!

Luigi’s mansion is one of them games to me which just slipped by me. I was aware of it at the time it came out and was one of those games where you think to yourself that you’ll get round to playing. Roll on 15 years and I’ve finally got round to playing it. I was reminded about this game by one of the people on social media I follow was going on how much of a fun game it was, so naturally there was no time like the present.

Story:

The game takes place in a haunted mansion when Luigi wins a contest that he never entered. Mario, who investigates the mansion earlier, goes missing, and it is up to Luigi to find him. To help Luigi on his quest, an old scientist named Elvin Gadd (or E. Gadd for short) has equipped him with the “Poltergust 3000”, a vacuum cleaner used for capturing ghosts, and a “Game Boy Horror”, a device used for communicating with E. Gadd. He also uses it as a map and to examine ghosts.

Gameplay:

In Luigi’s Mansion, Professor E. Gadd arms Luigi with two of his inventions: the Poltergust 3000 and the Game Boy Horror, which resembles another Nintendo product, the Atomic Purple model of the Game Boy Color. The Poltergust 3000 is a high-powered vacuum cleaner designed for capturing ghosts and gathering treasure. To capture ghosts, Luigi must first shine his flashlight on them to stun them. This reveals the ghost’s heart, giving Luigi a chance to suck it into the Poltergust 3000, steadily reducing the ghost’s hit points to zero, at which point they can be captured.^[2] The ghosts remain in the Poltergust 3000, although certain more advanced ghosts named Portrait Ghosts are extracted and put back into their portraits after a process at the end of the game’s four areas. When these paintings are made, they are stored in the gallery in Professor Elvin Gadd’s laboratory.^[3] Luigi must also locate three medallions, which allow him to expel fire, water, or ice from the Poltergust 3000. These elements are needed to capture certain ghosts.

The Game Boy Horror allows Luigi to examine items in the mansion, detect a Boo‘s presence in the room, and indicates its proximity to Luigi.^[5] It also contains a map of the mansion and lets Luigi and Professor E. Gadd communicate.^[5] Spread throughout the mansion are dark rooms containing ghosts, and when Luigi clears a room of all its ghosts, the lights come on and a chest usually appears. The blue chests contain a key or the water element, red chests contain three of the five items that Mario dropped and the fire element, green chests contain treasure, the only white chest (in the tea room) contains the ice element, and the gold chests (appearing upon the defeat of the area boss) contain special keys that unlock the door to the next area and King Boo’s crown. Whenever Luigi finds a key, his Game Boy Horror automatically indicates which door it unlocks.

Once King Boo, the final boss of Luigi’s Mansion, is defeated, the player is given a rating (A to H) based on the amount of treasure Luigi has found. A second version of the mansion also becomes playable, called the “Hidden Mansion”. In the European version, the entire mansion appears as a reflection of the previous version, bosses are different and possibly move faster, ghosts and Portrait Ghosts may be captured faster, and there are sometimes more ghosts in a room.