Minigame collections seem to flourish on Nintendo’s tiny white console, so it’s no surprise that that’s where this title is destined. And unlike many of the offerings on the console ready to be swung at, chopped to and balanced upon, Guinness Book of Records looks as if it’s shaping up to have a rather large dollop of quality thrown in with its fun and instant gratification.
Even if the sheep didn't think so, we thought it was fun.
Each game is based on an actual record, and many of them look to be as outlandish as those that we focus on each time we peer at the paper version’s many pages. Some of the records we tried our hand at were sheep shearing, growing fingernails, washing machine tossing, splitting watermelons with our heads, along with car balancing.
Each had its own control mechanic. Shearing and fingernail growing involved using the pointer. Fingernails could be grown by following a specific line as quickly as possible. Busting Watermelons involved a quickly timed swing of the controller. Balancing a car had us holding the remote horizontally to represent the vehicle’s tilt, as our poor avatar suffered under its weight. And tossing washing machines requested us to shake the nunchuck and remote in quick succession then flick them upward when it came to release our whitegoods. Going by the few games that we got to have a look at there seems to be a decent amount of variety on offer.
In order to select your minigame, you walk your avatar around a globe and select pictorial indicators dotted around which indicate what game is in which position. Each of these is in the country where the records was set. For instance, the shearing record is sitting on Australia - as it’s a country that’s far too boring to have a citizen who’s eaten an entire aeroplane, that accolade goes to France. Tournament style sets of games are currently not planned, so each must be selected individually. Once chosen, a short blurb about the record and its holder are available, along with some brief gameplay instructions and from there, it’s right into the action. In other words, the interface seems as if it’s going to be simple yet effective.
Reverse manicure anyone?
Following the international theme of the rest of the game, the records will be both local and international, meaning that if your Wii is connected to the internet then not only will you have yours, your friend’s and family’s scores to compete with, but also those from around the globe.
Unfortunately, in what is becoming a slightly disappointing trend, Nintendo haven’t seen fit to release their Miis to be used in the game, but as a consolation your character can be customised. From what we’re told this will be achieved via a fully fledged character creation system. The characters that we saw looked somewhere between Nintendo’s Mii’s and Microsoft’s Avatars.
We've got to be honest with you, upon first hearing that a game based on Guinness World Records was in development we were sceptical, but after trying our hand at a few of its minigames we've been convinced that our doubts were in vain. For a game based on such an unlikely premise it seems Guinness World Records is shaping up to be an oddly enticing option for some absurdly fun competition.
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