Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Game Review: Fancy Pants Adventure(s)

Fancy Pants Adventure(s) (also "The Fancy Pants Adventure") is a game where you play as some kind of "radical" stick figure guy.

It's probably inpsired, as far as gameplay goes, by the Sonic the Hedgehog games (which I've only seen a flash version of, myself, but from said flash game, even my kid brother agrees that it plays like a "Sonic clone"), because like Sonic, he can run straight up sloped walls...

...and even upside-down, though I don't have pics of that for you.

Though there is this weird-looking picture, which would be incomprehensible without context.

For some reason, the character's lives are represented by a little symbol that looks like his pants. I don't know what's up with that.

Anyway, the game's pretty simple-you defeat enemies by jumping on them and rolling into them, but mostly avoid them by running around really fast, while also collecting power-up type things and trophies and whatnot.

There's also this boss.

And if you lose (which shouldn't happen that often), you see this screen.

The game's pretty fun, though it does have a few flaws.

First, the character actually moves too fast, even from a complete stop, to be easily controlled for fine movements. You have to do little keyboard taps to keep him from flying off ledges and junk, which is annoying.

Second, while most controls are the arrow keys, the jump command is the "s" key. This is kind of a pain to remember. Both myself and my kid brother have a tendency to hit the space bar expecting that to cause a jump.

Third, it's rather too tricky, thanks to the aforementioned extreme speed your character is capable of, to precisely hit most enemies on their "sweet spots" while Goomba Stomping except with a bit of luck. I can't tell you how many darned times I'd just bounce off the darned guys instead of squashing them. Their sweet spots really ought to be a bit bigger.

However, despite the flaws, the game is fun, short, and doesn't require much thought. What more could you ask for in a short-play flash game?

-Signing off.

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