Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition Review

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition (NWC) is a game that exists in a strange place. NES Remix is an established franchise that is even tied into later actual NWCs, and the Championships themselves are more of a historical event that is more notable now for the rare cartridges related to it. I went to the preview and since then I’ve played a lot of this game, and I’m still not entirely sure what Nintendo had in mind for it. Let’s have a look at it together.  

Let’s start with the Speedrun mode. Speedrun is where the bulk of the game lives. Here you have all the available challenges, as long as you have the coins to unlock them. A lot of big NES titles are here; Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Kirby and Donkey Kong.

Each difficulty mode has a different cost to unlocking them, the harder the difficulty, the higher the cost. Legend mode is reserved for the final challenge for each game, usually offering a more lengthy and involved task. With these Legend challenges you’re given a little guide under the guise of Classified Information, reminiscent of old hints and guides. These guides offer useful information in getting the best run time, and giving you a layout of the challenge. Additionally, for every challenge you are offered a preview run.  This is helpful for showing you what the challenge is actually asking of you, but also potential best routes to take. This preview run could potentially annoy some players wanting to go in fresh (or from as they remember it) so you can just skip the preview run – hit ready and jump right in. 

There are over 150 challenges, with some games definitely more represented than others. The distribution feels about right, there’s understandably a lot more minigame-style challenges to get out of the Mario games, Zelda and Kirby. It is harder to get much more out of Excitebike and Donkey Kong, and I wish there were even less of Ice Climbers. If controlling Ice Climbers was frustrating before, having to speed through it will test your patience even further. But hey! I’m not going to judge you for being a masochist. 

Each game is represented as how they played on the NES, slowdown and all. If you’ve played these games countless times and you remember every jump, with the physics and level layouts burnt into your memory then you’ll feel right at home. If you’re coming back after a while then you might be in for a shock to how precise or clunky some of the games’ control after literal decades of improvements made to these series. Even just the changes between the Mario games within this game demonstrates that. Regardless, there will be a challenge here for everyone. Even if you know these games like the back of your hand, you’ve likely never had to see how quick you can race to bomb a secret cave, or defeat one of the many Koopa Kids, or just collecting the first mushroom in Level 1-1.

One of the frustrations I had in the Speedrun was around the size of the game screen for your run. You get two equal boxes, one to play your current attempt and the other box to see how your best run went. There is an option to have a bigger share of the screen in other modes, but strangely enough not in the main mode. The game is never unplayable on it, though when playing on handheld it makes the smaller space where the action takes place to really stand out. 

After the Speedrun mode we have the World Championship mode. This mode was only unlocked days before this review is due.While the current Championship is running you can play each of the challenges within it, in whichever order you chose. You can compete as many times as you wish, just replaying one of the challenges over and over until you’re happy with the outcome. With the first lot of world ranking or birth date ranking to not occur until days after release I can’t speak to how it works. However it does sound pretty simple in that it just gets everyone’s challenge times and ranks them! In which there will no doubt be some kind of collectible pin in game to show it off.

It was handy that the Championship doesn’t force you to run through every challenge in succession, as it would really drag down the pace if you’re just looking to improve on one of the times. Until there’s been a few of the Championships run it’s hard to know if it changes up enough, or if there is enough to sustain an audience to take part in the ranking. As a weekly event it feels like it’s spending too much time on the same five challenges to hold interest long enough that people will want to check back in a week later, other than wringing the value out of this game.

Survival mode is based around taking on three challenges, pitted against seven other players’ ghost data. Half of the players are eliminated each round. There is both a Silver and Gold Division, with Silver feeling somewhat more forgiving. I found one of the challenges in the Gold Division, I never seemed to stand a chance. Which meant when it was the first challenge and I was eliminated straight away. The Survival challenges  also seem to be a weekly collection of challenges, only in this mode you have to compete on one after the other and it’s randomised what order the challenges run in. 

Party is the multiplayer mode. You can have up to eight players on one screen to take on the Speedrun challenges, either individually or playing collections of minigames. This feels like a survival mode with real life players competing in real time, adding that extra tension and pressure to tackling some of these tricky tasks. One of the biggest saving graces is that there is an option to give up should you get stuck, sparing your friends, acquaintances and loved ones the minutes of waiting as you get stuck on a challenge. 

I’m actually disappointed that the Challenge Packs aren’t available to play in single player. Sure you could just play them as individual challenges, but having the themed collections is a nice touch. 

Rewinding means all is not over when you miss the goal or get killed in the challenge. Fortunately it doesn’t penalise you enough to keep from getting a decent ranking, if you can still get the rest done in a decent time. One issue I came up against was that the rewind feature doesn’t really seem to care where it’s rewinding you too. Once I had Pitt being saved from falling off the screen, only to be placed gingerly on the edge of the platform with some momentum I must have built up from the original attempt, leading Pitt right back down the pit. It wasn’t the only time this occurred and sometimes I would get rewound several times before I was placed somewhere safe. Ultimately with a fast-paced game like this, there’s not that margin for error to be set back so much. You might as well reset the challenge, and fortunately most of them don’t take too long. 

The games reliance on the Nintendo Switch Online for two thirds of the game is severely limiting for those who don’t have it. Given that neither mode even involves directly playing against someone (either having times ranked or ghost data used) makes it sting all the more. It also impacts playing the Speedrun mode too. To unlock challenges I hit a point that despite having everything at A rank or higher, I needed to grind for coins. If you want to rack up extra coins you’re going to want to play the other modes, which aren’t accessible without NSO. To require a subscription to pull ghost data and upload challenge times feels grubby when the game is already limited in its offerings.

It’s hard to work out quite who Nintendo World Championships is for. The way the different games are represented within this collection is so eclectic, it’s hard to tell how it fits into a world championship template. I could understand it more if the game was made to specifically recreate or capture what made the actual Nintendo World Championships a part of Nintendo history.

The Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is still an oddity. The number of challenges tucked away within falls short of what would be expected from a collection like this, while also doing very little to honor its namesake. What is there is a fun little collection of retro classics reduced down to minigame-sized chunks. How much you enjoy it will really come down to your fondness for NES games. This game is very much for speedrunners or people who are up for a time-based challenge.