Hands on with Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition

While I may never be a fully fledged Nintendo World Champion, I was given the opportunity to do the next best thing: to preview the upcoming game Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition. I will, of course, always be a Nintendo World Champion in my heart, but Nintendo has yet to recognise this achievement.

Recently announced, the Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition (NWC from now on) is a collection of time-based challenges from 13 NES games. The classics are all there—Mario, Zelda, Metroid, and Donkey Kong are all represented, with Mario games making up four of the titles (five if you want to include Donkey Kong; I’m mentioning it here to hedge my bets).  

Speedrun Mode

Speedrun Mode is where all the challenges are at, where each group of challenges is neatly (and logically) collected for each separate title. For most challenges, you’ll need to unlock them using coins. Fortunately, the coins seem pretty easy to earn enough to keep unlocking things. There were four levels of difficulties: Normal, Hard, Master and Legend. The most notable one will likely be the Legend Challenges, which appears more involved than the much quicker Normal challenges. 

Some of the early challenges are as simple as racing to get the first mushroom in Super Mario Bros. The first run might end up with you scouting out and getting a reminder of what block actually holds the mushroom, then it’s all gravy from there”. There’s clearing a screen of Octorok’s as fast as possible, the intro screen even hints at the order to best tackle them as they spawn in at different times. 

Some challenges can just be as ‘simple’ as clearing a level of Donkey Kong, most notably the final level where you remove the bolts. I could just keep listing out all the quick challenges, popping the first balloon in sight in Balloon Fight is another one! But I will spare you going over all 150 (plus?) challenges, just know there is a decent variety in the limited time I had to play them.

The trailer and the preview also drew attention to the Classified Information that can be accessed for the Legend Challenges which take the form of old Nintendo magazine hint books. There is an example in the trailers which show the ideal route to take to complete a run through multiple Mario levels. While this classified information can give you the low down, you still need to actually use your skills to perform it yourself.  

World Championships

The online ranking or online portion of the World Championships mode wasn’t up and running, so there isn’t much to say here. It does look like there will be timed challenges and the opportunity to take on the world. It feels like this will be a big part of the Nintendo World Championship title, so I am interested to see how it expands on the rest of the modes, but there will be plenty of time for that in the review.

We were shown Challenge packs that bundled up multiple challenges. There are packs around certain themes, such as speed or NES Cup collections. There will be more to say about this bit when I can face the best that the world has to offer as I throw myself at the mercy of worldwide online rankings.

Survival Mode

Here, we were pitted against seven CPU/ghost opponents, and the goal was to finish in the top half of the remaining contestants. Two divisions are available to compete in: the Silver and Gold Divisions. The Silver Division definitely felt like a gentler experience, where I could either win it or advance to the final challenge. On the other hand, going for the Gold Cup can easily see you getting knocked out in the first challenge if you make the slightest error. 

I could see myself (and did see myself) getting pretty stubborn with this mode, especially when I knew I had completed some of those challenges just minutes earlier in the exact same division. I felt myself becoming complacent, sluggish and that kind of frustrated you can get when you’ve fallen out of the really good groove you had going. Thankfully it was time to try the Party Mode as the ghost competitors were released from their eternal prison.

Party Mode

Party Mode is where you can put the ghost data away, grab some extra controllers and see who can be a NES champion. While there can be up to 8 players, there were just the three of us to battle it out to not be embarrassingly bad at NES games at a preview event. For the record all three of us were super awesome and they gave us medals on the way out (full disclosure: there were no medals, but we did pretty well).

There were two modes within Party Mode – you could go with a challenge package, or select challenges individually.We played through a bunch of challenges, which did feel a little more lively with it being against other people who can embarrass you in front of the nice Nintendo reps. Days later I am still haunted by how well I did at an Ice Climbers challenge very briefly, before really messing it up and getting stuck falling into a pit over and over until I gave up. 

Oh, there is a give up button/s available in at least this mode, while some of the challenges are pretty quick, those more difficult ones will take a few minutes. Why embarrass yourself for all of those minutes, when you can hit the buttons and tap out! Now I didn’t do it for every challenge, I was there to play a game and tell you about it right here, but I did give up at least once and sat there resolute in my decision to not let the Ice Climbers continue to make a fool of me. 

Party Mode is also points based, so instead of getting eliminated like Survival Mode it feels like there’s a real chance to come back (if you don’t give up every challenge and cruise through on a non-competitive zero points). 

Outside of the games mode there was another menu option; Pins! In short, there are pins to unlock. I didn’t go out of my way to see what secrets are hiding in Nintendo’s pin collection, but I know it felt like the game was throwing pins at me for completing the challenges. If you have that unlockable streak in you, this might keep you invested.  

While I was sitting there thinking (completely unbeknownst to the other lovely unsuspecting people there) I thought about how the format feels like it would be best suited to play like a WarioWare game. I doubt I am the only one thinking this way, and I refuse to look up any reaction videos from the game reveal. Playing the game for a little bit, I can see why it might not be suited, but that’s me trying to put an expectation on what a minigame collection should be, whereas there is a real focus on speed running throughout the modes. I do look forward to finding out if more time with the game will emphasise the importance of that focus on speed. 

For the preview, we were offered the Switch-compatible NES controllers (available to purchase) to get that (as close to authentic) feel while taking on these retro classics. It is definitely the most authentic experience of uncomfortable-feeling buttons after decades of more luxurious button feels. I know, I still bought them a while ago, and they do feed into that paying NES games vibe.

Please do keep an eye out for the Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition review coming out in July.

The game is available in both standard edition as well as the Deluxe Edition (below) exclusive to EB Games. The standard edition is available to preorder from Amazon, EB Games, Big W, JB Hi-Fi, The Gamesmen and the My Nintendo Store.