It's Mr. Pants (Game Boy Advance)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 3.0 stars Good
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 6.6 (3.0 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Frank Provo
• Reviewed on: 03/03/2005
• Released on: 11/15/2005
• Originally published on GameSpot: It's Mr. Pants (Game Boy Advance) Review

Believe it or not, It's Mr. Pants is a puzzle game. The title refers to the game's namesake, a cheerful stick person dressed in men's underpants. The game itself tasks you with rotating and moving randomly generated geometric shapes in order to create rectangles of varying sizes, which are then removed from the screen and turned into points. Many players will quickly fall in love with the line-drawn artwork that's used in the menus and backgrounds, as well as the barnyard sound clips that are the game's sound effects, but, beyond those aspects, It's Mr. Pants is merely an average puzzler with a limited array of features.

A complete lack of link options means that the game is strictly a solo affair. The three main play modes are called puzzle, wipeout, and marathon, and there are various difficulty settings for each. Completing each mode on one difficulty setting unlocks the next tougher setting and lets you access the line-drawn background artwork used for that mode in the bonuses menu. Depending on which mode you pick, the rules change slightly. In the puzzle mode, you're presented with an artsy mass of bricks and have to clear it using a preset selection of pieces. There are more than 200 unique puzzles to solve. In the wipeout mode, the screen starts out jammed with a random assortment of bricks, and you have to use randomly appearing pieces to clear them out within a two-minute limit. The final play mode, marathon, puts you up against a creature known as the crayon snake and gives you five minutes to put together as many rectangles as you can from an unlimited supply of random pieces. The crayon snake is actually a constantly growing barricade that fills the screen in a counterclockwise spiral, which can be reduced, but never completely removed, by making large rectangles.

Much like in the timeless classic, Tetris, the shapes that appear in It's Mr. Pants are cubes, I shapes, and L shapes made out of bricks of various colors. The game also tosses out lowercase versions of the I and L shapes, as well as a dotlike single brick that's handy for filling tiny holes. When you put together a rectangle using like-colored bricks, the rectangle will disappear, and you'll earn points based on how large it was. The controls are relatively straightforward. You can move pieces around with the D pad, rotate them by pressing the left and right shoulder buttons, and set them in place by pressing the A button. A display on the right side of the screen shows you the next two pieces that will appear. Pieces of the same color can't be overlapped, but pieces of differing colors can. This is the game's main strategic aspect, and it's a helpful one, because it lets you bisect large masses of bricks or snip off errant bricks from an otherwise perfect rectangle.

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