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First wave of games on a new system are seldomly very graphical or rich in gameplay content. Rarely do you find a first wave game that lacks both. This is the case with Nintendo Gamecube's Luigi's Mansion.
The main purpose of playing a game is to have fun and kill time. None of which Luigi's Mansion accomplishes. I found Luigi's Mansion to be no fun at all. Although, it wasn't completely boring, it didn't give me the urge to hold on the controller to keep playing.
Let me start with the general goal of the game which is to catch ghosts. That's it! It doesn't change throughout the game nor does the types of ghosts.
Second, the challenge of the game disappears the moment you become accustomed to the Gamecube's controller. Unlike, Super Mario World 64 where the difficulty steadily increased to match the players' adaptation with the controller, Luigi's Mansion's difficulty level never left zero.
Third, the music in Luigi's Mansion wasn't great either. It sounded like it was composed using the system's General MIDI feature. Which is terrible considering the massive storage capabilities of compact discs. What really put the final nail in the coffin music wise was that the musical theme repeated throughout the whole game dispite changing floors of the mansion. This might have worked had this game been released on the NES or SNES but for the CD based Gamecube is unacceptable.
Graphically, Luigi's Mansion is at the bottom of the barrel among first wave games. Yes, the lighting, mist, dust, water, and fire effects are nice. However, I've seen the same things on a lessor scale accomplished on the N64. It seems as if all the graphical attention was paid to the ghosts and Luigi and not to the rest of the mansion. Certain background objects that needed to be three dimensional were left in one. Another graphical slip in Luigi's Mansion is the details paid to the walls. The details of the walls within the mansion don't increase as the distance between them Luigi decreases. This factor might've helped the realism. I thought the days of playstation bitmap layered walls were over. I guess I was wrong.
Overall, Luigi's Mansion is not a bad game, it's just a bad game to buy. The good thing about Luigi's Mansion is that seemed to be a protype testing the systems capabilities. Perhaps, this game was just a stepping stone for greater games yet to come. It's sad that Luigi had to be the one to suffer through it. Nintendo really should've created a character to play through this game and not tarnish the rep of Mario's bro.

Save your money and buy one of the other games like Rogue Squadron and Tony Hawk or even John Madden.

So, Luigi's won a mansion and Mario's gone to check it out. Mario hasn't returned though and things aren't lookig good. It's up to Luigi to save Mario from the ghosts haunting Luigi's Mansion, and your weapon of choice...the Poltergust 3000. If you were to combine Ghostbusters, Resident Evil, and Scooby-Doo, this is what you come up with. Luigi's Mansion is full of fantastic graphics, great play control, good music and sound, spectacular lighting effects, and innovative game play. The game requires you to hunt down all manners of ghosts, and use your head to try and capture some of them. Though this game is fantastic, it is somewhat short. That's the game's only downfall. Despite this, the replay value on the game is considerably high. It's well worth buying and is a great addition to anyone's game library.

This game is awesome. True, I got a little spooked at times, but it was totally worth it. I could not put this game down! You just keep going and going! It's tricky because it makes you think. It was so fun, I played it for almost 3 days straight! It's not as fun the second time you try to beat it because you already know how to catch the ghosts, but it still is fun to catch them! I really hope that you buy this game!