It's Mr. Pants (Game Boy Advance) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
176A playthrough of THQ's 2004 puzzle game for the Game Boy Advance, It's Mr. Pants.
This video shows each difficulty level played through in puzzle mode:
Easy 1:05
Medium 16:12
Hard 53:18
Special 1:58:29
It's Mr. Pants is perhaps the most "colorful" puzzle game I've played that wasn't made by Panesian. Created by Rare and released during their early years with Microsoft, the game was originally shown publicly in 2001 as "Donkey Kong Coconut Crackers." However, after splitting with Nintendo, Rare decided to redesign the game, complete with a new hero, for its eventual release in 2004.
Enter Mr. Pants, casually dressed egg-of-a-man and the mascot of Rare's website.
If that doesn't sound funny to you, remember that Rare is based in England, and the meaning of the word "pants" changes from one side of the Atlantic to the other. In the US, pants=trousers, but in England, pants=underwear.
If you weren't aware of that before, Mr. Pants' (rather fetching) red briefs probably make a bit more sense now. At least, they might if you appreciate British humor.
The object of Mr. Pants is to clear all of the blocks from the playing field. You clear pieces by forming rectangles of 2x3 blocks (or larger) of the same color. You are given a limited number of blocks to solve each puzzle with, and you can only lay your blocks over blank spaces or blocks of a different color.
It starts off easy, but once you've set your sights on hard, Mr. Pants really starts going to town on you. Those later puzzles are insanely devious. The patterns become far more complex, the timer becomes a huge stressor, and you're given no room for error in the placement of your pieces. You get unlimited tries, but some of stages will make you bang your head against a wall. The only reason I don't have to retry puzzles several times in this video is because I had taken notes while playing in preparation for recording it.
Though the timer and the inability to see all of your playing pieces from the start tend to make the later puzzles much harder than they needed to be, the game is addicting. Just try to exercise some restraint when it comes to asking for hints. The game will freely give you the solution to any of its puzzles, but if you abuse the feature, you'll be depriving yourself of that smug sense of self-satisfaction you feel when you finally manage to solve a toughie on your own.
The graphics and sound are both hilarious and crude. Mr. Pants is the star attraction, of course, so you'll often be staring at his modestly clothed form. He's a bit of alright, though, so it's not as disturbing as it probably should be. The music is just as great, and just as dumb.
It won't be long before you catch yourself singing under your breath, "Dum de dum de de dum de dum do..."
Mr. Pants is not pants. Anything but. It's a fun, creepy-yet-charming experience that kept me occupied for a long time.
I wish that I had a genius bit of innuendo to end this on, but I don't. My bad.
*Recorded using a Retroarch shader to mimic the look of the original hardware.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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