Luigi’s Mansion, the original game in the glorious ghost-hunting series, was a launch title released for the GameCube in 2001. However, beyond a remake on the much underloved 3DS in 2018, the 24-year-old classic has long been tough to play without using emulation. And it’s worth playing, because it’s completely brilliant! So it’s tremendous news that on October 30, the game is being added to the GameCube collection on what’s now called Nintendo Classics, available to anyone with a Switch 2 and the expanded subscription.
OK, admittedly I’m struggling with the fact that I remember playing this game on release like it was a decade ago, not two and a half of them, but my own battle with linear time aside, this is all good news. It’s wild to me that Luigi’s Mansion hasn’t been ported to every Nintendo console since, given just what a stone-cold classic the third-person ghost-vacuuming game truly is.
Poor Luigi, ever trembling in the shadow of his brave brother, is notified that luck is finally going his way, and he’s won a mansion! Except, he never entered the contest, and it turns out the place is a haunted wreck. Thankfully, Professor Elvin Gadd has made a base in the place (presumably squatting?), although he explains the building only popped into existence a few days earlier. Oh, and Mario’s trapped inside. So Luigi, using E. Gadd’s Poltergust 3000 vacuum cleaner, sets about clearing the mansion of its ghostly inhabitants.
The game received a fairly frosty reception from some on its release in 2001 (GameSpot called it the most disappointing game of the year!), partly based on its relatively short length (it comes in under 10 hours), and partly because it wasn’t a Mario game. Much like the Switch 2 launching with a Donkey Kong title and not the expected new Super Mario extravaganza, the GameCube similarly confused the masses with a Luigi-led project that was an entirely new type of game from Nintendo. It wouldn’t be until almost a year later that Super Mario Sunshine came out to fill that gap, and GameSpot called that the most disappointing game of the year, too!
Anyway, all those moaners were wrong, and judged not as a substitute for a Super Mario game but as something very different in its own right, Luigi’s Mansion shines. It’s quite easy (apart from the stupidly hard final boss), it’s relatively short, and it’s very, very funny, and that’s what it was setting out to be.
It is, however, worth noting that this addition is the original game, and not the much prettier 2018 3DS remake, which itself now wallows in the sad misery of abandonware.
If you have the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscription (oh please can Nintendo give that a new name too?), you’ll find that Luigi’s Mansion will appear in the GameCube section of Nintendo Classics this October 30, just in time for spooky season.
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