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It's Mr. Pants 
Release date: 1 Mar 2005
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Mygamer review
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The Accidental Videogame Star
Mr. Pants got a good break: had Rare not been bought by Microsoft, this game would have nothing to do with the company’s long-time, unheralded mascot. It’s Mr. Pants got its start as Donkey Kong Coconut Crackers, a puzzle game with pseudo-3D visuals and spruced with Donkey Kong trimmings. It was seemingly abandoned after Rare parted ways with Nintendo, but the project is finally complete in its new form.
Other than losing the Donkey Kong characters, the most noticeable transition is the move to a static 2D layout for the puzzle sequences. The visuals in Coconut Crackers were more immediately striking but had a jarring tilt to them, and could have posed a problem when dealing with the strictly 2D puzzles found in the game. It’s Mr. Pants doesn’t have flashy visuals, but the graphics are clear from the start and easy to work with. One aspect that could have been more striking is the puzzle pieces themselves: they look functional enough, but even with a backlit screen it is sometimes easy to miss a lone piece at the perimeter of the screen.
Mr. Pants looks like a stocky, underwear-loving (“pants” being English slang for “underpants”, you see) caricature of Charlie Chaplin. The character seems crudely drawn at first, but is animated with more personality than many 3D-rendered videogame counterparts. Voice samples are a big part of Mr. Pants’s character. Each part of the game is introduced by a quip; at first, they are all amusing but some eventually grate more than others. I still get a kick out of the frantic “Oh no!” on an intro screen, but hearing “Eww, smelly!” every time the game starts gets old quickly.
The three separate play modes available from the beginning are Puzzle mode, Wipeout mode, and Marathon mode. Each has four corresponding difficulty levels: Easy, Medium, Hard, and Special. The easiest mode lives up to its name, as players will likely rapidly conquer this section in all of the play modes, but by the time the player reaches the highest difficulty level they will be tearing their hair out in frustration. Overconfident gamers can’t immediately jump to a harder stage, either, as the higher difficulty level in a mode is unlocked once the one preceding is complete.
Each play mode has the same layout and the same types of Tetris-like puzzle pieces. The interface contains minimal clutter and the information is divided on the screen into two major parts. The playfield on the left side of the screen is where all of the action takes place. Puzzle pieces can eliminate existing blocks on the board by forming a square or rectangle of the same color. The pieces cannot overlap blocks of the same color but they can overlap differently colored ones, and one of the more enjoyable aspects of the game’s strategy is planning the block layout in such a way that multiple rectangles of varying colors can be formed and eliminated at once. The right part of the screen shows the forthcoming two puzzle pieces, so successful players will use this information to plot some semblance of a long-term strategy.
In Puzzle mode, the goal of each level is to clear the board by combining a series of new blocks with a pre-set arrangement. The new pieces are served one at a time and the player has to place them on the board within a certain period of time or the block will fall automatically. If the block falls on an invalid spot, it is counted as a lost round and the level must be restarted. The more likely way to fail is when all of the new blocks are served but the board isn’t empty. There will be many, many more losing rounds than victorious ones, but that’s not a problem. Going from start to end in a round, be it losing or winning, takes such a short period of time that most players won’t miss a beat by having to restart.
Restarting a string of levels more than ten, fifteen, or even twenty times can become a bit tiresome, however. In the initial levels, there will unlikely be more than a few tries needed, but the middle to later stages are wildly unpredictable. Every few levels a player will serendipitously race past it in one or two turns, while subsequent rounds will take upwards of twenty or twenty-five turns. Most of the final levels are devilishly tricky and cam take an excruciatingly long time to solve.
Enter Helpo, Mr. Pants’s sidekick. Helpo is a curious-looking rat that appears after three consecutive failing attempts in a level, snoozing in the bottom-right corner. The player can then trigger Helpo awake, who upon the first subsequent incorrect move will demonstrate a correct one instead. Correct moves are based upon a limited in-game script; players who use the help system will shortly discover that Rare encoded only one walkthrough per level, which becomes cumbersome in the many symmetrical levels. Helpo could have used a stronger dose of intelligence to be more useful, but.since the levels are so short, it doesn’t require much effort to work around this limitation. For hardcore players who insist on completing every level by themselves, or for hardcore cheaters who get their hints from outside the game, bragging rights can be had as the game records the number of levels for which help was called.
In Wipeout mode, a random sampling of blocks is splattered across the screen and the player has two minutes to entirely clear it. This mode is no cakewalk: even at the lowest difficulty level, the board is moderately challenging. Random blocks with fall in conjunction with the game’s difficulty setting. The game will end when the screen is filled to max capacity. There is an especially addictive quality here – as time is running out, there will often be few enough blocks left to make even long shot possibilities feel reasonable, giving an extra incentive to go just one more round.
Marathon mode is another race against the clock. This time, the board starts completely empty and as time progresses, a snake gradually winds its way around the edge of the screen towards the middle. If it reaches the center of the screen in the five minute timeframe, the game’s over. The snake is temporarily moved back by eliminating blocks; whenever a group of blocks is cleared, the snake moves back a number of paces equal to the area of the rectangle. This mode is overall easier compared to Wipeout mode, but still maintains a decent level of tension.
This is somewhat of an odd choice to represent the culmination of Rare and Nintendo’s history, but it’s not so quirky that it feels off-putting. There is a lot to do in It’s Mr. Pants between the different styles of play. None of the puzzle modes are individually at the pinnacle of the genre, however, and the trial-and-error-based gameplay might only appeal to enthusiasts. This is a basically puzzle-gamer’s game, but the initiated will find it a largely compelling one.
Review by Nicholas Abboud on 5 May 2005
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