Party Game Sundays: National Geographic Challenge!

This past Sunday I had to go to a stupid meeting, so I arrived to Party Game Sunday a bit late. Due to that fact we ended up playing a few board games instead of the usual video games. Lucky for me I didn't write about the games we played during the previous Party Game Sunday! Now I get to do that, which is exciting for everyone.

The first game we played was National Geographic Challenge for the Wii. The case for the game makes it seem like some kind of adventure game where you travel across the world and play various mini-games, but that couldn't be farther from the truth. Instead it was a game almost entirely about geographical trivia, and shitty puzzles.

GET READY TO PARTY!

The goal of the game is to claim the most countries in the world. To start you choose a mode of transportation and a starting country. You then move around to other countries. You can move to the one next to where you are, or one a few countries over. If you go a few over you'll need to answer a travel question for each country you pass over. The questions all have to do with the country you're passing over. They range from insanely hard to painfully easy, so that's fun. Once you reach the country you need to answer either a series of questions about the country, or put together a dumb-ass puzzle.

It may sound like I'm being kind of harsh on the puzzles, and that's because I am. They suck. You either need to put pieces onto an already displayed image, or fill in blanks. There's also a dumb one where is shows some of the image and then you need to guess what it is, but the choices are never in the image shown. That's because it's only showing a portion of a larger image.

*Face palm*

The same things happen if you're trying to take a country from another player, except that you both figure out the puzzle or answer multiple choice questions.

When you take the game as what it's supposed to be then it's fairly competent. It's a decent quiz game for learning about geography and learning various factoids about the world's many countries. It's just not fun. Sure I got a little excited when I answered questions to take countries from someone else, but that's because I like winning against my friends.

This is a game about learning and there's nothing wrong with that. It's just that I'm not attending Learning Time Sunday. I show up for the party and this game certainly didn't bring that.

Note: This game is also for the PS3 and 360, which is totally nuts, because the graphics suck.