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We’re as sick of mini-game collections on the Wii and DS as the rest of you, but we give everything a fair shot. We may have only seen Guinness World Records: The Videogame on Wii and DS because the demo preceded Lego Batman, but our time Wii Remote waggling was by no means a waste. We might not be the best bunch of guys for breaking records in real life (although Wes claims to be able to fit a fist in his mouth), but we had a good go at shearing five sheep as fast as possible.
Guinness World Records is aiming squarely at two groups of people. There are the 7-15-year-old boys and the party gamers. The Wii and DS versions feature 36 mini-games a piece and are designed to be simple yet tricky to master. Each game has also been designed so that the global leaderboards (yes, the game includes online leaderboards as well as boards for just your console) aren’t littered with thousands of people with the same score. So, instead of games like “How many cockroaches can you eat in 10 seconds?” you’ll be taking part in “How quickly can you eat 10 cockroaches?”. Whereas the former might see tons of people at the top on 10 cockroaches eaten, using time allows for more variety in results.
So, the Cockroach eating. Perhaps we’ve been watching too many episodes of Fear Factor, but this didn’t make us squirm as much as it did our German friends. Still, it’s more than disgusting enough to please young boys and slimy enough to freak out bored housewives. Gameplay is incredibly simple: pick up cockroaches by pointing at them with the Wii Remote and eat them by moving the Nunchuck up and down as vigorously as possible. We’ve come to expect very little from third-party mini-game collections on the Wii, but we were pleasantly surprised by the effort made by developer Traveller’s Tales. The way cockroach slime dripped from our on-screen character’s teeth as he chewed added a lot to the experience.
We then saw one of those world records that doesn’t seem that incredible until you give it a go yourself. We had to tear five phone books in half as quickly as possible. TT has tried to mimic the actions of real life activities as closely as possible with the Wii Remote and Nunchuck. In some cases the mini-games feel almost spot-on, whereas others only have a passing resemblance. This is one of the latter, with the Wii Remote needing to be tilted until it vibrates (you’ve found the tearing point) and the Nunchuck needing to be moved up and down to tear the book in half. Not exactly how you’d do it in real life, but fun all the same – and that’s the key. Despite our preconceptions going in we found ourselves enjoying the party game atmosphere.
Our TT rep then got everyone involved with a series of four-player challenges. These ranged from trying to set the land speed record to shearing five sheep as quickly as possible. One of TT’s goals was to make all the Wii games playable with just the Wii Remote so that everyone can easily take part. These multiplayer games proved that they’d been successful, with none requiring more than a few seconds to get the hang of. Of course, being the elite gaming pros that we are, we set the best time for the sheep shearing – you only had to move the Wii Remote as if it was an electric razor, and going last gave us a sneaky advantage.
We’ve yet to see how well the DS game shapes up to the Wii version, but we left TT’s small meeting room fairly amused. Perhaps we’ve been shown the cream of the crop when it comes to the included mini-games, with the rest being less fun and more awkward to play, but we saw nothing to suggest that is the case. Last year we pretty much dreaded having to play a series of poor mini-game collections with family members who had been bought a Wii, but with Guinness World Records things might not be so bad.
Guinness World Records is due out for Wii and Nintendo DS in October/November this year.
