Based on Rare's off-beat mascot, It's Mr. Pants is a traditional puzzle game in the Tetris sense where the challenge is to piece together specific shapes of specific colors on a flat playing field grid. The idea is simple: form rectangles of larger than 3x2 to make them disappear from play. The pieces can be rotated in 90 degree variations, important to get these tiles into the littlest slots on the field. You can't place same colors on top of each other, but you can place other colors on top of already placed shapes to remove them from play. There are three variations: in "Puzzle," the challenge is to remove all shapes from play with the set amount of pieces. In "Wipeout", you've got two minutes to remove all shapes from play with an infinite amount of pieces. And in "Marathon," the challenge is to constantly place and remove shapes as long as you can, trying to keep the session alive as the playfield gets eaten away from the outside in.
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Fairly decent
I played this because of a scott the woz video.
Its kinda neat.
Interesting take on a block puzzler, you gotta make squares/rectangles to eliminate them, you can overwrite other colors with new blocks but not the same color.
The idea works and has some depth to it, though I sometimes feel like the only way to solve some of these is to know what all the pieces are going to be, but it only shows the next few. All this means is that you're going to fail some of these at least once.
Also it could be my gba but I'm almost 100% there's an unseen timer to place blocks, the puzzles are quick enough to retry thats its never game ruining, but it's certainly frustrating to have the game just force you into a mistake.
It's Mr. Pants is a unique enough puzzle game. You are given Tetrimino-esque blocks in 4 different colors (but varying sizes, sometimes as small as 1 block) with the goal being to clear existing blocks off the board. Blocks are erased by creating rectangles at least 2x3 in size, and blocks can be placed on others of a different color to replace them. What makes the main mode both appealing and tricky is that, unlike Tetris, you're not getting randomized pieces. Rather, each puzzle has a predetermined order and amount of pieces which you have to use to end up with a completely empty board. It takes a while to learn the game's internal logic, but after a little bit of "How on Earth am I ever going to figure this mess out", every puzzle's solution did become apparent without resorting to looking up the solution. If you need it, there is a solid in-game hint system if you've failed a puzzle three times in a row which will correct your first incorrect block placement.
It was engaging and intuitive enough that I played through the 25 Easy and 50 Medium puzzles, but pushing through all 75 Hard puzzles is too much. (EDIT: I have now learned that there is a FOURTH difficulty setting with 100 puzzles in it. Very glad I stopped!!) It's a very clever game, but as the difficulty increases, it becomes more about guessing the dev's intent rather than puzzling out the solution yourself.
As a Rare game, it of course has a great soundtrack by the Beanland/Wise/Fischer combo, and features vocals by Mr. Pants himself, which add a lot of character. I'd recommend giving this a shot if you're looking for a unique brain-teaser, but I wouldn't call it a must-play by any means.