The Fancy Pants Adventures Preview

I want my own fancy pants now...

After the presentation at EA's recent November Showcase event, Nick found me and asked me what I was interested in covering. Being the old-school nerd that I am, the first thing to my mind was Fancy Pants Adventures, a throwback to the classic 2D adventures of old wrapped around a stick figure in some faaaaancy orange pants.

Starting out as a Flash browser-based platformer, Fancy Pants Adventures was created when developer Brad Bourne and Over the Top Games partnered up with EA to bring out their colorful, stick-figured hero to consoles. Playing through the demo really reminds me of a bunch of classic titles, from the SNES Uniracers to Ninja Gaiden, with a flair not unlike the more recent Alien Hominid (minus the guns and giant robots), all wrapped around more traditional Mario/Sonic platforming and control. It's a little slick on the pad, but there's still time to work on those issues.

It's shaping up well enough on the visuals. The environments are already crammed with details and color, which really harkens back to the Flash game roots of the game's predecessor. There were very few enemies in the levels I could romp around in, but like Fancy Pants Man, they're all animated to the nines. They are, after all, supposed to be "fancy".

The folks at the demo were tight-lipped about any specifics, being that the game was there as a first-time look, but I was told there would be mini-games thrown into nearly every level via a character unique to a given environment. Only one was being shown, though: a timed high-score game based around jumping, flipping, and momentum. It was pretty thin and easy to decimate the first-time through, but it could be amusing to challenge friends to.

The animation is smooth, it reeks of nostalgia, and there are plans to bring in as much replay value as is possible with a game like this. And that package drops sometime in the Spring of 2011. Until then, there's always the original Flash game to hop-and-bop with.