Party Game Sundays: The Amazing Race

We've been sitting on The Amazing Race for months, because in order to properly play we needed four people. In case you've never seen the long running CBS reality show I'll explain it a bit for you. There are multiple teams of two, and their goal is to travel to various destinations around the globe. Each episode of the show is considered a "leg" of the race. So teams will travel to various places and compete in challenges. At the end of the leg the last team to arrive is eliminated. Sometimes it's more than one, but for the sake of this game it's only one at a time.

So, the game is kind of like that. You make a team of two and you compete in stupid mini-games, while ridiculous load times and stuttering happen. When we were playing I could hear the Wii reading the disc very loudly. It was even happening when nothing was really going on. There are short vignettes where the host of the show will have some terrible pre-recorded voice-over and they are literally two seconds long. The freaking console would kick into high gear reading the disc and then the frame-rate of the poorly rendered version of the host would drop drastically all in a two second period.

This looks just like Phil Keoghan!

With that being said the game itself was alright. We chose to play five legs, but only ended up doing four. At the beginning of each you choose a plane to take to your destination. Some will be faster, but cost more money. So generally we would pick the free plane in order to save funds for a faster ride later. This eventually came back to bite me and my teammate in the ass. The same thing would be done at the end of each leg to reach the final destination, except with buses and taxis.

In one of the legs my friend Justin and I were three hours ahead, which in terms of the show would mean exactly that. We would get to leave three hours before everyone else. That wasn't the case in the game. We ended up getting eliminated in the fourth leg, because we chose the free plane and got pretty far behind. We thought we'd be okay, because of our three hour lead in the previous leg. Turns out the previous times mean literally nothing, so we were eliminated. Not taking the previous legs time into account means that only your results in the final leg matter as long as you don't get eliminated prior to that.

Don't pick the free one. Trust me...

Needless to say I felt pretty cheated, but on top of that the game itself wasn't even really super great. The mini-games also had some hot frame dropping problems. I only remember two of the mini-games. One had us scrubbing plates clean to discover a specific symbol. The other had us counting down time so that we could push A when the timer was close to zero. We played the timer one a few times. There might have been one about water balloons too? I don't know we played three games that week.

     -Manny