Minigames haven’t so much fallen from favour with contemporary gamers as plummeted to a grisly death on the spikes of their cynicism. While the Gameboy Advance’s WarioWare was a machinegun volley of microcosmic creativity, (requiring players pick the snot from a wincing nostril or jump a fast-approaching sausage on wheels), since those magnificent beginnings, our overexposure to vapid copycats has made the term a dirty word.

It’s also a dirty word that’s become synonymous with Nintendo’s Wii. While WarioWare showed Nintendo distilling gaming’s first principles into joy giving, 5-second interactive sit-coms, other developers have used the format as a way to make a quick buck with a minimum of thought and effort. Steal a few simple mechanics, skin them with a coherent and whacky theme, pour into a paper-thin metagame and bake for six months. It’s a recipe for fast money.

But it’s also a recipe for consumer skepticism, which has grown like a cancer from the Wii’s casual library into the console’s very soul itself, making it the poster child for all that is cheap, insipid and misleading about casual gaming. Mingame collections are scorned and shunned, as, increasingly amongst hobbyist gamers, is the Wii itself.

The danger, as with all black and white opinions, is that gamers throw the baby out with the bathwater. Good games are good games no matter what their length. Short form gaming can often be a hundred times more compelling and joyful than the long form epic, the Fallouts and the Final Fantasys, which require weeks and months of time investment before they fully reveal themselves and their treats. Nowhere is this more apparent than with Travelers’ Tales Guinness World of Records, a minigame collection for the Wii that has been bypassed by gamers at large (and the BATFA review panel in small) despite presenting one of the strongest developments in gaming this year.

The game’s triumph lies in its leaderboard, a fitting success for a license that whose raison d’être is to find the world top scores. During every one of the minigames your current score displays in the top left hand corner of the screen. Below that sits the top score that’s been registered on your console thus far. Pass that marker point while playing the minigame and the game will now display the best score recorded by players in your region. Now you’re fighting to beat Brian from East Sussex, or Bernice from Lancashire for the accolade of county champion. Pass them while playing and you’ll now be gunning for national champion and beyond that, you’re up against the world record holder, the only rival that stands between you and global dominance.

The genius lies in the constant relevance of the challenge. Like Geometry Wars 2 before it, which placed the next-highest scorer on your friends list on screen at all times, Guinness World of Records makes beating your next rival the only thing that matters. In most games the top spots on the global leaderboard are so out of reach that it renders the overarching competitive element to the experience largely meaningless. What’s the point in striving to record the fastest track time at Nurembergring when your best efforts place you in sixteen thousandth place, beaten by gamers half your age and with twice as much free time on their hands to perfect their technique? Guinness World of Records makes every single high score attempt matter, regardless of whether you’re trying to beat your mum or the reigning world record holder Troy_Wondercluck from Illinois.

By creating such a compelling competitive element to the game, one that dominates the experience and inspires repeat play after repeat play, any shortcomings of the minigames themselves are diminished. That’s not to say the tasks you’re competing for dominance over are in any way bad, far from it, just that the importance of their individual merits is greatly lessened. Seeing how many cockroaches you can eat in a minute is a stupid thing to attempt when sat in a dark lonely apartment on your own, but do it in front of cameras and a cheering crowd for a place in the record books and, at that moment, it’s the most important thing you can do with your life. Context trumps content.

You can read the rest of the review over at Eurogamer here