Developed by: Nintendo | Published by: Nintendo

+

Great character creation. Nintendo people are the masters of creating cute lovable characters and an artistic feel that tap into the player's simple, unsophisticated emotions and makes perfectly suited for the young audience (the audience that they always go for). The music, sound effects, and graphics add to the cute personas.

Variety of interactions (most of which are fun). Stunning, capturing, and collecting ghosts, collecting coins, getting and using elementals, each boss ghost has a unique attack pattern and unique way of weakening them, answering quiz questions, checking each room for money and other lootable items, and getting keys to open doors and unlock more areas of the map (although this one's contrived).

The gameplay seamlessly integrates reactive and strategic elements. Whenever confronted with an enemy, he creates a queue list of actions to perform (i.e. vacuum off the mask, stun, vacuum the ghost up). This also happens when the player enters a new room - a queue list of actions to perform for searching the room, lighting candles, etc. The queue list is never too long either. The reactive elements involve each item of the queue list (i.e. stay at adequate distance and point vacuum at ghost to get mask off, quickly stun with flashlight, quickly start vacuuming, keep pulling in the opposite direction of the ghost).

Miyamoto continues to design his games where things are not quite what they seem - it looks like a mirror, but it's really a window that warps you to the entrance; it looks like an empty space, but there's really a ghost there waiting to spring at you; it looks like a plain, ordinary book, but it's really a kamikaze warrior that shoots at you and tries to kill you; and so on.

When you catch the Boos the Professor guy calls you up to tell you what an awesome job you're doing. This not only makes the event more gratifying, but more social as well. Social aspects to the game should happen more often though.

The rooms are a nice size. They're never too big - with too much walking - and they're never too small - with no room to move.

-

The controls are really awkward sometimes. It mostly has to do with telling which way the vacuum stream is pointed. The occasional counter-productive camera angle doesn't help either. Also, at the beginning there is a lot of explanation from the ghost friend person, which means the controls are not intuitive enough.

Saving your brother Mario seems like an uninteresting thing to do. Luigi is also a character that seems more like a sidekick, and not a character I should be playing because he's not cool enough. He shivers and gets scared all the time. He also has to resort to saving his brother because he's not cool enough to save the princess. Girls don't like him, I guess. Definately not a character I want to be playing. He also spends his time vacuuming up ghosts and putting them into paintings. Pretty strange guy if you ask me.

The gibberish talking is confusing. They should just stick to English.

The Game Boy inventory tracker is the cheapest product placement scheme I've ever seen. It really degrades the quality of the game.