E308: Wii Fanboy sets records in Guinness World Records: The Videogame
Aside from knowing the game exists, I didn't have anything else to go on when I came across Guinness World Records: The Videogame at my closed-door session in the back of the Warner Bros. meeting room at E3. When the game was revealed, I figured it would just be another cookie-cutter mini-game compilation that didn't hold much value. Actually, I was wrong, as Guiness World Records is a pretty fun title.
The majority of the game has you traveling to various locales throughout the world and competing in the three available mini-games for that region. You travel by walking your avatar (sorry, no Mii support!) across a large globe that represents the world. Once you have arrived at your destination, you simply click on it to jump in and check out what's there. Some of the locales I saw included Egypt and South Africa, which was nice because it doubled as a geography refresher.
While the demo didn't have every region available, it did have quite the number of mini-games to play. Sadly, my appointment was really just for LEGO Batman, so I only got a few minutes with the game while I waited. In this amount of time, I was able to smash some watermelons with my head and shoot myself out of a cannon.
Each of the mini-games required some sort of motion-based controls, which have been implemented decently. For example, in the watermelon mini-game, I was forced to smash oncoming watermelons with my head, flicking the Wiimote down to represent this action in-game. The motion controls never skipped a beat and I performed quite well, proving to me that the controls work well and have been instituted quite effectively.
Guiness World Records: The Videogame will support Wi-Fi leaderboards, allowing you to compare your score with friends online. Sadly, that's the only Wi-Fi feature in the game, as players can't enjoy multiplayer online. But, there's definitely support for local multiplayer, which is great because this strikes me as geared toward the social crowd and the younger audience.
In the end, I was pleasantly surprised by Guiness World Records: The Videogame. It was a genuinely fun time and not a piece of shovelware that I expected it would be. The mini-games were engaging and actually controlled well, which was very nice. Fans of fun mini-game compilations should definitely keep their eyes on this one.
