Nintendo's 'And-Kensaku' turns Google searching into a game

Back in October 2008, Nintendo of Japan showed off a ton of Wii games all at once. They're still not all out yet. Some, like Cosmic Walker, remain largely mysterious, while we're only recently hearing renewed discussion about games like Span Smasher (now called FlingSmash). One of the weirdest games from that already-weird lineup was Kensax, a minigame collection in which competition was based on achieving search engine queries with greater results than your opponents.

Nintendo has since renamed the game to And-Kensaku, opened a website (earworm warning!) and announced a new partner for the search engine: none other than Google. Using a set of 10,000 words provided by Google on the disc (with more available by going online with the game), players will compete in activities like guessing which words are more popular, doing "and" searches with given words and your own words and using the number of results to add stairs to a staircase as you climb it, and passing a bomb around that explodes in the hands of the player with the fewest search terms. Yes, it's really, really strange.

And-Kensaku will be released in Japan on April 29. There's no word on an international release, though it's entirely possible that Nintendo of America will bring it to E3 and then never mention it again, like Line Attack Heroes.

[Via Andriasang]