Guinness World Records

During the opening credits of Record Breakers, Roy Castle and Cheryl Baker used to sing, "If you want to be the best, if you want to beat the rest, dedication's what you need," but they never even hinted at what dedication will earn you other than simply being the best. The best at what? Best fascist dictator? Best doctor? Best pension embezzler? Best glass-juggling unicyclist?

Doesn't matter. Just 'best.' People love 'best.'

And they do. The Guinness Book of World Records is a fixture in British households, even extending to a video game edition as of this year. To accompany the conventional edition, meanwhile, Player X has just released Guinness World Records, a collection of mini-games in which the aim is to surpass existing records for doing things that would get you arrested in another context.

There are six challenges to begin with, plus a seventh that you can only unlock by buying the latest edition of the Guinness Book of World Records and entering a code. Being high-powered insiders, of course, we know exactly what the seventh game entails, but we're going to keep it to ourselves in the interests of suspense. It's a good one, though, and trickier than the others.

Of the remaining, there are few enough to go through them one by one, starting with Text Challenge. This mini-game, based on a record held by Ben Cook since 2007, involves entering the text Cook managed to enter in 42.22 seconds – a sentence about razor toothed piranhas, containing a string of words you've never heard of.

The original text scrolls along the top of the screen in Cook time, and your progress is recorded below. There's no T9, so you have to arrive at each letter by cycling through them, and as such Cook's record is difficult to beat, especially so before you've memorised the sentence. If you do manage it, though, you have the satisfaction of knowing you've actually broken a record.

The remaining records feature a range of mini-game-friendly activities, and all star a grinning avatar whom we'll call Norris, even though he has no name.

Pogo Stick involves bouncing along a race track and trying to gather momentum by timing button-presses so that you land on a yellow stripe. The mechanic of gathering pace is well-conceived, making success a matter of getting into 'the zone', but it's far better implemented in the other mini-games.

Melon Splitter, for instance, tasks you with breaking John Allwood's record for destroying 40 watermelons with his head in a minute. The melons slide along a conveyor and you have to crush them by pressing '5' to bring up a power meter and then pressing it again when the gauge is in the right place: hard enough to crack the skin but not so hard that you damage Norris's frontal lobe. The more you get in the sweet spot, the faster the conveyor belt goes.

Sheep Shearer, meanwhile, involves shearing a parade of sheep that each have arrows on their flanks. Hit the right direction with the keypad as they pass and they'll speed up; miss and they'll slow down, limiting the number you can come out with.

Tight Rope, the weakest of the collection, involves pressing '4' and '6' to make minor adjustments in Norris's stance as he negotiates a tightrope.

Strong Man, conversely, is the best of them, requiring you to beat Ed Shelton's wantonly destructive record for ripping phone books in half. Here, a cursor sweeps back and forth across a power meter at the bottom of the screen, and it's your job to stop it in the centre.

If you succeed, Norris will jubilantly tear the book in two, but if you get it wrong, he'll struggle. When this happens, a column of arrows appears beside him, and you need to press the corresponding directions to finish the book off. The distance by which you miss the centre determines the number of arrows that you need to dispatch.

It's an ingenious mini-game, and the high point in a small but solid collection. In an ideal world, we'd have asked for more than the seven available (six if you don't have the book) but what's there is well-presented and playable. It's not quite the best, it doesn't beat the rest, but it makes a spirited attempt.