It's Mr. Pants

Continuing from the other week, this blog post is a brief review of “It’s Mr. Pants,” another one of Rare’s forgotten gems from the Gameboy Advance. I still haven’t completed the game, but I have played enough of it to know that the ending isn’t a plot twist where Microsoft shoots Mr. Pants in the face.

And like last time, I’m not going to just talk about the game itself. There’s a history to the greatest character to ever come from Britain that you must know!

Mr. Pants was born from a shortage of artists. Yes, that’s why he’s so…special. Rare needed a mascot for one of it’s many web sections specifically designed to mock the stupidity of its fans. No artists were available, so Leigh Loveday, one of Rare’s writers, designed a character himself, art technique be damned! And thus Mr. Pants was born.

The game originally had a different art style. It had the same gameplay (from an isometric perspective), except the game was called “Donkey Kong: Coconut Crackers.” After the buyout, all of the parties involved felt it would be awkward for a Microsoft owned studio to make a game starring a Nintendo mascot, and since Mr. Pants, tired of only having cameos in Rare games, demanded to have his own game, Rare decided to turn “Donkey Kong: Coconut Crackers” into “It’s Mr. Pants.”

“It’s Mr. Pants” is a puzzle game. There are various colored blocks in place when the player starts a level. The game gives the player a block that the player can rotate with a specific color (red, yellow, blue, green) and in a specific shape (square, L, reverse L, etc.) and the player places the block in the level. If the player makes a rectangle of a single color, the rectangle disappears, and if the player places that block over a block of a different color, the new block destroys the parts it touches. Once the player has placed the block, the game gives the player a new block. The player only has so much time to place a block, and if the player runs out of time, the block is set down for them. The goal of each level is to use each block the game gives it to clear the board. The closest relative this game has would be Tetris: Flawed Edition.

About the art, you’ve probably have already noticed this: the art is supposed to be bad. That’s part of the universe’s charm. In fact, all of the artists for the game were required to draw all the artwork using their non-dominant hand, a technique that Tim Burton used on his character artists when working on The Nightmare Before Christmas.

The gameplay is fun, for the most part. There are various modes in the game, but the real meat is found in the Puzzle mode. In Puzzle mode, there are three sections: easy, medium, and hard. Easy and medium are a bunch of fun, but once you hit hard, the gameplay begins to show quite a few flaws in its design.

The first problem I have with the gameplay is that there is only one solution to each puzzle. That becomes a problem in the hard puzzles when you’re given a dozen or so puzzle blocks, but you only know what the next two pieces you are going to get, making it impossible to make a long term strategy. It’s almost like the designers built the puzzles in mind that player would know all the pieces from the start and changed the game just before shipping it. Another major issue is that the puzzles become more about “look at the cool image I made” and less about “clever puzzle design”. For example, one of the puzzles was a multicolored cat. First glance at the puzzle, I had no idea where to even start. The timer in the easier difficulties was a nice touch, forcing the player to think efficiently, but in hard, the timer just becomes more of a burden.

The game seems to fight against the above foibles by offering a hint system, but that just makes the problems even worse! You can only use one hint each time you try the puzzle and the hint system is very specific where you place the block. If, say, I placed a block to the left of another block, the hint system would slap my wrist and move it to the right side, even though placing it on either side would be an acceptable solution.

The game in hard mode becomes the following: get a block, use the hint system, memorize solution, spam all the other blocks on the board, fail the puzzle, restart, repeat until you know where every piece is supposed to go, and start the next level. Unless you are ridiculously lucky, hard mode just becomes a chore to play.

Ultimately, I still really enjoyed “It’s Mr. Pants.” Easy and medium difficulties in the Puzzle section were really fun, I haven’t tried the other sections yet, but I did acquire a bunch of scribbly art postcards in the game to look through in the gallery. It’s the kind of game that you do not 100% or even 70%, unless you really hate yourself or if you suffer from severe OCD. I think part of the reason I love the game so much is because of the art style. I don’t think I would be too upset if Mr. Pants didn’t get a sequel to his puzzle game debut, but I would certainly love to see him star in his own platoforming game or at least see him in more cameos. Such a shame that Microsoft took him and all the other Rare characters to the giant warehouse from “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” never to be seen again. *Sigh*. Such a shame…