Last year I decided to replay Luigi's Mansion after having first played it back in 2018. I had a fantastic time and decided I would replay it every October. Well, Spooky season is now back so it's time for the annual replay. Yeah it's still a ton of fun.

As I stated before in my other review, the short length of this game makes it an ideal one to replay every year I think. I beat it in a day which is perfect since I'm a lot busier than I used to be. The shortness combined with the unrivaled atmosphere, funkiness and control scheme makes this the definitive Luigi's Mansion game in my eyes. There's just little things I love about this game that the other's lack. Like the funky jingle that plays when you pickup keys and stuff or how when you're not interacting with anything, Luigi calls out to Mario when you press the A button. He even has different calls when you're low on health. The one here at 0:04 is my absolutely favorite, has me laughing every time.

This game has that weird 6th gen GameCube charm that I love. 2 and 3 while not bad, both feel sterile in comparison. Idk, nothing is as raw as that ending where Luigi just starts crying and laughing at the fact he's finally reunited with Mario, it's genuinely so heartwarming I love it so much.

As I said in my other review, it does have its faults. I don't particularly like Boolossus. I just think they made it way too tedious to hit the boos with the ice. The high HP boos are also still somewhat annoying, though I feel like they weren't too bad this time around. Again, if they just didn't give them massive amounts of health...or even better just don't let them fly into different rooms, then that issue would be alleviated.

In the end though, I do love this game. Definitely a game I'd like to continue to replay every October and definitely one of my favorite GameCube games. After this I plan on playing Dead Space and Silent Hill, hopefully I'm able to get them in before Super Mario Bros Wonder comes out cuz I'm definitely playing that day 1 lol.

P.S: Oh yeah, this time around I decided not to get all gold portraits. Last year I did and while I'm glad I accomplished that feat, having to gold Sir Weston again doesn't sound like a fun time. I did get mostly golds though which is cool. I also didn't forget the gold diamond in the plant this time around so thank god. Because of that my score was 122,000,000 something which aint half bad. I also forgot to mention I played the hidden mission this time around. I wanna say I played the hidden one back in 2018 as well but i forget if I beat it back then. Enemies do more damage, there's more of them apparently (I didn't really notice a difference) and your vacuum sucks way faster now which was super fun and helpful with those portrait ghosts.

What’s better than a game where you walk around and press one button? A game where you walk around and press no buttons!

I played this game back in 2006 when it first released and I really enjoyed it, then a power outage happened while I was saving and it was my only save file. I never had only one save file ever again and that’s a pretty big impact on me. I bring this up because this game is a massive time investment and I was very much not willing to get back into the mix, 60 hours down the drain. Zodiac age completely and absolutely fixes this. The game comes with a 2x/4x speed up mode that completely trivializes all the leveling and walkin around you have to do. Very much like the speed up mode on emulators, it makes the game accessible in a way it previously was not. I was able to beat this game in around 30 hours because of this feature.

Now I will actually talk about the game itself, like I said at the start. You essentially just setup menus and actions before you start combat and let the game play itself. It feels like a miracle that this game is fun. But the environment, story, characters, leveling system, license board, gambits, hunts all combine together to make this very enjoyable experience.


It was very cathartic to come back to this game and beat it. That’s all I got to say. Good times

This did not take too long to beat.
I feel like in 2001 this would be a 9/10 game. For its time this game probably was seen as very revolutionary because I remember what was around at that time and pretty much the other biggest show in town was metal gear solid or grand theft auto. To have some straight forward cop shooter where the main guy’s super power is that he is so angry he can slow down time is really awesome. Max payne is basically the punisher, you are live role playing criminal genocide. All you do in the game is move from point A to B shooting as many guys as possible. It’s pure boneheaded caveman smashing rocks together type enjoyment. Considering I played this on a whim after playing Alan wake 2, it is completely and utterly head spinning to go from one of the most complex and intricate video game stories ever made to one of the most straightforward pulp ass hardboiled noir detective trope heavy stories. But it works well for the feeling of the game. Max Payne is always saying stuff like “snow flakes were coming down like I was about to come down on injustice”, it’s hilarious simplistic and stupid assume, I am defiantly going to start saying “I made like chow yun fat” every now and then for no reason.

The worst parts of this game are easily the dream sequences. Dawg kill me, I don’t ever want to do platforming in a game that is not made for platformkng while there is a looping sample of a baby screaming its ass off.

The bullet time and dodge mechanics still feel like a very fresh idea to me. You can use them defensively or offensively and they make everything that is on screen look very cinematic and fancy. It’s not quite a “trick” action game like godhand or vanquish but it gets the job done.

All in all this game holds up really well. I can see why it helped propel Remedy to the heights they have reached in later titles like Alan wake 2 or control.

Seems every months near abouts there is a gaming controversy I am on the opposite side of as the majority. Now I am gonna try not to be mean to fine people who have down voted elden ring to oblivion. But I have to ask, What were you expecting? Seriously, what reason did anyone have to think we were gonna get anything other than what we got from, from software?

A lot of people don’t realize or remember that this event with people whining about the difficulty has happened before, even within the context of Elden ring itself. There was an early on warning to players, level up your vigor. This game is not dark souls 3, you can blast through the game with just leveling up your damage. The pinnacle of complaints came from the point between act 2 and act 3 approximately the point where you reach the fire giant.

The game rapidly hikes up in terms of difficulty when you reach the end game portion. For some, it made them upset because they wanted to play the game they had been playing in the past with bloodborne or dark souls 1 or 3. But you simply could not do this in elden ring. The bosses move like lightning and hit like freight trains, they are so much faster and brutal than any of the bosses from soft has put in their games to date. To compensate for this, you are allowed the opportunity to become armed to teeth with a massive array of combat tools. The spells have never been stronger, never been more varied, never been better blended into the gameplay. Elden ring has done a better job than any of the souls games before it of implementing magic. You could do a kamehameha that can one shot a lot of bosses if you get the setup right. On top of that, the game has a gigantic amount of disparite systems that support a wide way to handle combat situations. The point is to say, your options for killing enemies were varied.

Now that was a long winded way of getting around to my point. What’s changed between act 2 and 3 of Elden ring and act 3 and the dlc or Elden ring?

I think part of difference is Elden ring warmed you up a bit before spiking up the sauce. For most people playing the dlc. They have been cold for probably a couple years before picking up the dlc. So the extremely brutal gameplay was probably a bit overwhelming. On top of that this, the dlc has a unique interdlc level system. Now people don’t like this system very much. I personally think it’s great because it encourages exploration in between difficult boss fights. Elden ring’s core value proposition went something like that, because it’s not linear you can try a few different things to help with progression instead of grinding the boss till you win.

In addition to the scadutree fragments there are many new weapons, spirit ashes, etc.

Stepping back to the difficulty as a point of contention. I have a different take on the benefits of the game being so difficult. T
From my perspective it helps you fixate on the environment. Because you spend so much time dying and running through the same areas over and over, you get to notice the highly detailed architecture or bizzare mysteries surrounding the ecosystem and how it might work. Such as why are there scorpion spider things here? Why are they also by that river I was just at as well.

That’s a style of story telling I appreciate, it’s subtle, it’s something that could only be done on the gaming medium, and it rewards thoughtfulness.

The difficulty at least from my perspective forced me keep evolving my strategy and the way I played the game as I went through the DLC. Ending in me developing a very complicated and obtuse strategy to clear the final boss(took me 3 days).

For those that review bombed this game. Maybe don’t buy from soft games in future, you are not built for them and they aren’t built for you. Go back to Ubisoft and play one of those shitty games that tells you everything you need to do in explicit detail, scrub!