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It's Mr Pants Review - GBA

Introduction

I’m one of the four people worldwide who bought It’s Mr Pants. For some reason, it just never really caught on with the public. They clearly don’t understand the innate humour of pants. Thankfully, Rare does, and when Nintendo pulled the plug on them (good move or bad move?), they were left with a half-finished game called Donkey Kong Coconut Crackers. Well, it wasn’t even called that, because Nintendo owned the DK license. Their solution? Throw in fan-favourite character from the Rare website, Mr Pants. Turn the wackiness up to eleven, throw in the lewd jokes we all know and love from the company, and there you have it: a disappointingly poor-selling GBA game.

Gameplay

The basic aim of Pants (as I will henceforth be calling it – apostrophes in game names just aren’t cool) is to place blocks on the field to form rectangles. Any rectangle larger than 2x3 disappears, clearing more space. There is no gravity, so you move your piece around with the d-pad. B rotates, and A drops it in place. The pieces aren’t tetrominos – they’re more random too, like ‘corner’ bits made up of three pieces, and single units.

The complexity comes when you introduce different coloured tiles. There’s always a minimum of two different colours of blocks (incidentally, you can see the next two blocks available) in play at once, and of course when you play for longer and get higher scores, more are introduced. So, you try and make rectangles of the same colour. The trick is that you can place one colour of block (say, red) over a different colour block (say, blue) that is already on the field. You can’t, however, overlap with a red block that is already in play. That’s where the key lies. For example, if you have one long, misshapen mass of colour, you can split it up by placing a different colour in between to smooth off the edges. In fact, if you can do it in one move, you’ll get a combo bonus when both halves disappear.

In print it sounds easy (at least, to me re-reading the above paragraph it all makes perfect sense) but in actual fact the overlapping part takes some serious mental gymnastics before you can even begin to play well. Yes, there’s a heavy learning curve. You’ll gradually get to grips with the game as you work your way through the different modes. The Puzzle mode effectively acts as a tutorial, presenting you with increasingly difficult set pieces on the field, and challenges you (with a limited number of pieces) to clear the board. You’ll gradually get your eye in, so to speak, and when faced with complicated situations in the other modes there’s no question that you’ll be able to pull off impressive combos thanks to what you’ve played through in puzzle mode. Plus, you get postcards of Mr Pants every five puzzles that you complete! Awesome!

One quirk of ... (continued next page)