How Luigi's Mansion warns us not to fall for raffles on social media
Luigi's Mansion (2002)
Luigi’s Mansion (2002)
Spending half my life on the Internet, I’ve gotten used to seeing all manner of interesting online scams, but this one was a beauty - a Facebook raffle where, for a mere €100 entry fee, you could buy yourself a ticket to win a house. I suppose it’s bad enough in the housing market nowadays that your only chance of getting a roof over your head and a shelf for your anime figurines is by winning a lottery.
But take note - sinister cronies though they are, this isn’t estate agents and realtors pulling the name out of a hat here - no, this is Johnner Murphy up the road, pretending to sell his senile great-aunt’s house. Between you, and a shell Facebook account run by his best mate, who do you think is gonna win?
Listen, I’ve run these kinds of competitions before. You tell people to Like and Tag and Share, you give it a couple of days, and then you “randomly” pick whoever has the most social media clout as the winner. That way, everyone wins.
Now, I was only giving away perfumes and handbags. You know, things I wouldn’t have wanted to stash away and keep all for myself. But a house is a bit of a precious commodity, not to be lightly given away to some slack-jawed fool who turns up with a century in his hand and a rabbit’s foot round his neck.
I really have to admire the scam, while of course pitying those who fall prey to it. If you just want to dip your toes in a little, there are also smaller scale scams out there where you could try to win a car instead. Again, Toyota and Volkswagen don’t tend to raffle their cars off, nor is anyone on your friends list so bursting with automobiles that they can afford to give away one more.
But then of course, it’s not about affordability, this is about making a profit off marks and pigeons. Which makes me wonder just how the guys up the road planned to make bank, when it was €100 to enter and the gaff was valued at around €350,000.
That would have necessitated 3,500 entrants, plus a few hundred more to cover the fees, because I hardly think you can just give your brother- I mean, the lucky winner - the keys of the house and it’s goodbye. They invented conveyance lawyers for tricky little things like that. Do you reckon you could win a 4,000-to-1 shot that’s rigged against you in the first place?
Well, Luigi did. No really, Luigi’s only gone and won himself a lovely mansion, out in the countryside. I have to say, bit of a reversal in fortune for someone who’s usually a luckless sod. The fact that he hadn’t even entered any such competition ought to have set some alarm bells ringing though, I feel.
After all, we’ve all received letters and emails telling us that we’ve already won, but we don’t ever want to know what we’ve won, from where or how to get it. In hindsight, it would probably be just Luigi’s luck to fall for a scam email that horribly affects the outcome of his life like this.
So this is the story of Luigi’s Mansion for GameCube then, although there’s a bigger story happening here. This was the game tasked with bringing the new Nintendo GameCube into players’ homes. Again, just Luigi’s luck that he’d have to carry a piano like this on his back.
I’m afraid neither he nor the game itself did a particularly good job here, although it’s not the poor man in green’s fault really. We all wanted a game fronted by his brother as a launch title, but it wasn’t ready. We certainly would have liked Zelda as a launch title, but that wasn’t ready either, not to mention it was about to get all cartoony.
Smash Bros would go on to sell many a GameCube console, but it hadn’t become a colossal enough name just yet. Even Sonic got to the GameCube before Mario, Link and Samus did. It seems to me that the Nintendo developers were almost as surprised at the release of their new console as Luigi was at winning his mansion.
Oh well, no time for Luigi to concern himself with any of that, he needs to move in to his new home. Of course, wouldn’t you know it, the mansion is dark, spooky and derelict. And according to the very eccentric inventor Professor Elvin Gadd, who lives nearby, the mansion wasn’t even there the previous night. Great!
Naturally, when it comes to ghostly houses, it’s usually the work of the Boos, but it ain’t just them this time - they’re joined by more familiar looking ghosts, familiar if you’re very well acquainted with the works of Casper I should say. Actually, if you were wondering where Mario could have got to, he’s been kidnapped and bunged up in one of the mansion’s many rooms and it’s up to Luigi to find him.
Never fear, my man (or rather, fear a lot because this is where you became a giant scaredy cat for the first time), Professor E. Gadd just so happens to have the right gadget for you, Q from 007 style: the Poltergust 3000, designed to suck up ghosts.
They called him a fool, they called him a crackpot, but now, E. Gadd’s proven them all wrong. Secretly, we all enjoy a cheeky bit of hoovering around the house, and I never have a problem turning the nozzle on living creatures, like spiders, flies, cats’ tails. But what about un-living creatures like ghosts? Can they be sucked up and emptied out in the same unceremonious way that all your hair and dust is?
Well yes, as it happens. The novelty has long since worn off, of course, but here for the first time we got to use two analogue sticks to control a Nintendo game, and as the game itself tells you, you can liken the ghost-catching in this game to catching a fish.
You generally have to stun them with your flashlight first, before they’ll begin to acquiesce to the mighty discipline of the vacuum cleaner. I do tend to find this a bit finicky, though - many’s the time I’ll stun the spectre perfectly, but then by the time Luigi’s sorted himself out and got his PolterHenry up and running, the ghost is dancing on his face and you’ve lost another 10HP. It can be a little bit frustrating, and you’re thinking, “this never happened to Egon Spengler.”
What can be frustrating as well is the game loop. Really, the whole point is to explore the mansion room by room, many of which are behind locked doors. So you’ll have to find the doorkeys through solving puzzles or attacking the phantomly invaders and previous homeowners.
But then, just as you’re going deeper and getting immersed - and Luigi’s Mansion really is a game which must be played strictly at nighttime only - E. Gadd gets on the blower and pulls you back to his lab to explain some nonsense.
I’d rather just get fully into the adventure, going deeper and deeper into the levels of the house, maybe getting the occasional tip from the Prof before he’s suddenly eaten by werewolves, and things begin to get really creepy. I suppose we’d have to wait ‘til Resident Evil 4, another GameCube exclusive, to play something like that.
Better still if we could have gotten all of the above in a mansion or experience that’s different every time you play it, because Luigi’s Mansion is infamously short and the only real replay value is in getting the highest score, which was a little old hat in 2002. No, I'm sorry, but this isn't an enjoyable game at all. No wonder the GameCube failed, if this is how things got started.
The controls are off, I don't like the aesthetic of the ghosts, it's very short although that's almost a blessing, there aren't enough good tunes, it's frustratingly linear and generally the game lacks polish. The only positive points are its atmosphere and immersion. Leaving those aside, this game is pure boak.
You'll probably enjoy the first half-hour, though, so there’s that. I suppose it's a bit like shelling out a hundred quid for a raffle ticket - it’s a bit of short-lived fun, that comes at slightly too high a price these days, and you might enjoy some of it. But don’t think it’s going to enrich your life anymore than a losing ticket will. A losing ticket, eh? Story of Luigi’s life.
28 July 2023