With a low price tag and an unusual licence for a videogame, it'd be easy to quickly dismiss Guinness World Records as just another vapid, shovelled-together collection of minigames for the Nintendo Wii, intended to capitalise on the Christmas market.

And certainly there's some evidence to support such a claim. Each of the many little games you'll find here is quick to pick up and play, generally lacks depth and is designed to give you a quick fix before you move on to the next. But still, don't dismiss what's here quite so quickly, because it does actually work a little better than you might immediately expect.

Basically, you and up to three further players set up your characters (no Mii support that we could find, sadly), and set off across a world map in search of new records to break. These are centred around major landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty and the pyramids of Egypt, and each has three activities attached to it.

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These activities relate to records that were set in that part of the world and only the first is available initially, with the other two waiting to be unlocked should a target score be matched. It's a little annoying that you can't get to everything at once, but that's a common trend now.

To tackle a record you are faced with a minigame that relates to it. The world's longest fingernails, for instance, requires that you trace along the nails of someone's hand at speed, for as long as said hand remains on the screen. Meanwhile, balancing a bus on your head is a question of tilting the Wiimote backwards and forwards to retain some kind of equilibrium. Pulling an aircraft requires the Nunchuk - as a good chunk of the minigames do - to work in tandem with the Wiimote, and you'll get far less out of the game if every player doesn't have one.

Now sure, there are some games here that are utterly forgettable, to the point where you'll struggle to return to them. But conversely, lots of them work and the game gives you incentives to keep plugging away at them. Whenever you're approaching a record, for instance, you get an on-screen indication. This might just be a personal best or a console record.

Then there are national and regional records, before you eventually get to become champion of the world. To have so many tiers to work through is a good thing, as it gives you a continual desire to keep plugging away, and in conjunction with the one-more-go compulsion of some of the minigames - knife-throwing, for instance, is a hoot - it's hard for the game not to adequately entertain a room of people.

Its single-player appeal is inevitably limited and there's no shortage of such collections on the Wii. But, with the addition of facts about world records liberally scattered across the world map, this is a friendly and interesting game in multi-player mode and one that manages to justify that budget asking price. A sequel would not be an unwelcome proposition.

A slight package of party games, but the World Records glue holds them together better than you might be expecting.