At the simplest level, Guinness World Records the Video Game is a collection of random mini games. With a total of 30-some games in all, these range from getting the highest jump on a bicycle to smashing a record amount of water melons with your head. When you first start the game, you are given a choice of eight kids to play as. However, they are all rather un-detailed and look the same more or less aside from gender and skin tone. This is one of the main problems with this game. Who are these kids and why should the player care? And for that matter, why are these kids attempting to break so many world records?
Some type of back story would have been nice. Is the Hispanic child attempting to bring back honor to his homeland where the cartel is about to overthrow the government? Is one of the girls attempting to get money for kidney surgery for her elderly father? Or maybe one of the other kids is simply an ego-maniac attempting to gain world recognition? Come on, just give me something here so I know why the heck a group of kids all decided at once to travel the world breaking random records along the way! Comical ranting aside, since the character models aren’t all that detailed, a create-a-player feature could have been implemented so players could make some semblance of themselves in the game.
Moving on from the characters, after you select who you want to play as, you are sent to the world map where, with awkward pointing controls, you stumble around until you land on a country you want to play in. Each country has three mini games that you can play. In an odd game design choice though, at the start of each country, you can only play one game. From there you have to buy the additional two with points you get from gaining records on other games. It seems like a cheap trick to make the game last longer, as it would have been easier and quicker to have all three games available in a country at once, and then use the points you gain to unlock new countries to play in.
One good redeeming quality of this game is that it in its design, it is very easy to pick up and play. Each game has a brief instruction screen and should you forget the controls during a game, on screen prompts will come on to remind you. Also, the control is a lot smoother in the actual games than on the map screen. Loading times aren’t that long, and while you do wait, there are real life Guinness records displayed for the player’s interest. And should you desire to do so, you can log online and see where your high scores match up to other players’.
