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A look at some new coming games. |
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| Luigi's Mansion
Mario's slimmer, greener brother takes centre stage for the Gamecube launch - but has he got what it takes to live up to the family legacy? Surprised? After 20 years of perfect platforming, Shigsy's sent his Mario series careering off in a totally new direction. Luigi's Mansion is the polar opposite of Super Mario 64 - dark, claustrophobic, surprisingly simple, and this time featuring Mario's paunch-free brother, Luigi, in the starring role. Thankfully, Luigi's Mansion is also brilliant, brilliant fun. The mansion itself, first prize in a contest that Luigi's wishing he never entered, is filled from basement to attic with ghosts - and the green-dungareed plumber's job is to exorcise 'til he's blue in the face. Armed with just a torch and a vacuum cleaner - the former used to temporarily spook the spooks, the latter to suck them up - your mission is to clear the sprawling abode's every room of cackling spirits, before the sun peeks over the horizon. It's a worryingly simple concept on paper, but in practice Luigi's Mansion is as irresistibly intuitive and infuriatingly compulsive as any of Miyamoto's titles. It may look simple, but once you've got your hands around The brain-meddling controls - the C-stick moves Luigi around, while the grey control stick turns his upper body to direct the torch or hoover - everything feels perfect. The flawless way Luigi responds to each push of the analogue, the panicky flight of the ghosts as they scramble to fly clear of the vacuum, that patented Ninty 'ding' with every coin collected - Luigi's Mansion might not be as sprawling or varied as the rest of the Mario clan, but the sheer attention to detail means there's no risk of repetitiveness. At E3, Shigsy made no secret of the fact that Luigi's Mansion is expressly designed to show off GC's graphical power - just watch the way shadows dance around the rooms, mirrors reflect Luigi's petrified form, and curtains flap and candles flicker in the breeze. But it's also a great game in its own right, and with only one level on show at E3, it's undoubtedly got plenty more surprises - and scares - up its sleeve. |
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 ARGH!!! GHOSTS!!! |
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| Super Smash Bros. Melee
The original Smash Bros was - still is, in fact - a genuine modern classic. Taking a fantastically high-concept idea (a beat-'em-up starring all of Nintendo's mascots) and bringing it into super-fast, primary-coloured life, the N64 finally had a fighting game to be proud-of. Of course, all those who clamoured for the N64 to get its Tekken were slightly mystified by the game; it was almost a platformer, in that stratospherically high triple-jumps could be performed, and the multi-levelled arenas required a more acrobatic fighting style than that found in more mundane beat-'em-ups. But this original slant made the game all the more refreshing - and now the Gamecube gets Super Smash Bros. Melee, the inevitable sequel. After wowing everyone last week at E3 - the queues for the game were phenomenal, dwarfed only by what could justifiably be described as the game of the show, Rogue Squadron 2 - closer inspection of the game sees something very similar to the original title. Granted, the visuals are simply astonishing - the backdrops, in particular, spread out for miles with astounding clarity - but the basic gameplay remains the same. Namely, lightning-quick fisticuffs on a 2D plane. However, that said, this is definitely a case of bigger, better more. For a start, there's an alleged 30 more power-ups to be used, and the ubiquitous Pokemon can now be played instead of your character, rather than simply zipping out a pokeball, making a single attack and buzzing off. Also, rumour has it there may well be around 27 characters total in the game, although of course many of these will be secret characters. As far as 'new' playable fighters are concerned, we've seen Sheikh (the disguised Princess Zelda from Ocarina of Time), Bowser and the Ice Climbers (eskimo-style characters from an obscure NES game). All the old favourites are back, of course, as are all of the old arenas - a good thing, as we simply loved the Zelda-based castle-top - but the new levels shown look tremendous. The F-Zero arena is a case in point - like the Planet Zebes level from the original Smash Bros, it features extraneous hazards, in this case a slew of F-ZeroSuper Metroid - and the expected four-player multiplayer support. Controls, however, have changed. Whilst the Gamecube pad is as comfortable as we'd hoped, the Throw move (one of the most useful abilities in the original game) is either absent or plenty of people have missed it, and items - power-ups - now do far less damage. It remains to be seen how the actual fighting will be balanced in the final version of the game, but we trust developers Hal will stick close to the original template. Super Smash Bros. Melee is looking beautiful. Believe us, until you've seen it in motion, it's hard to appreciate just how gorgeous - and how fast - this is. And whilst it is more of a next-generation update of the original game than a true-blue sequel, we can't wait to play it outside the confines of the LA Convention centre. More soon. |
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 Our favourite dungareed hero is back, and yet again, one of the best characters in the game. |
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 Team Starfox returns! At last! |
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