Gaming 7

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition Review – A Little Short of the Leaderboard

Nathan Birch • Jul 17, 2024 at 08:00am EDT

Game Info

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition

July 18, 2024

Platform

Nintendo Switch

Publisher

Nintendo

Developer

Nintendo

You just never know what Nintendo is going to tap for nostalgia next. The Nintendo World Championships are a concept the company has revisited in a scattershot way over the years, but it’s the original 1990 iteration most folks remember, and really, it’s not even the event itself that’s most famous. That first competition was held using unique NES cartridges, which are now the ultimate collector’s item fetching upwards of $25,000 apiece. That’s the main reason the Nintendo World Championships are still remembered today. Despite that somewhat obscure legacy, the Nintendo World Championships are returning once again, this time as an actual widely-available video game.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition offers a series of challenges derived from a slate of 8-bit classics, but will they have you running and jumping for joy? Or does Nintendo miss the podium this time around? Limber up your thumbs, it's time to find out...

While Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition purports to follow in the footsteps of The Big N’s competitions of old, the real inspiration for the title seems to be the modern speedrunning scene. While the original 90s Nintendo World Championships, and most of the iterations that followed, were all about high scores, this new game is about doing things fast.

NWC: NES Edition serves up over 150 discrete challenges, drawn from 13 first-party 8-bit Nintendo titles (Super Mario Bros. 1, 2, 3, and the Lost Levels, The Legend of Zelda, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, Metroid, Kirby's Adventure, Kid Icarus, Ice Climber, Excitebike, Balloon Fight, and Donkey Kong, to be exact). It’s a solid lineup, if a bit by-the-books and missing third-party favorites like Castlevania, Mega Man, and Battletoads. Your performance in each challenge is rated, with coins being awarded for improving your best times and letter grades. You can then use those coins to unlock more challenges and simple cosmetics like icons and badges for your online profile.

Challenges start extremely simple – grab a mushroom as Mario, suck up an enemy as Kirby, ect. – but increase in complexity until you’re being asked to complete entire stages. Eventually, you’ll unlock a final “Legend Challenge” for each game, which, in a cute touch, are accompanied by simple strategy guides. In the case of the original Super Mario Bros., you’re tasked with doing a true speedrun of the entire game, but sadly, that’s an exception rather than the rule. While other Legend Challenges remain fairly daunting, they’re definitely more limited – the Mario 3 challenge asks you to complete the game’s first world, the Metroid challenge only consists of the final escape sequence, ect. This sense that Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is kind of toying around with the concept of speedrunning, without fully embracing it, kind of pervades the whole package.

The games play pretty much like they did back in the day, with optional on-screen controls and prompts for those who want to get back up to speed quickly. While I’m sure true retro fanatics and speedrunners will find differences and anomalies between the true original NES games and these versions, for the most part, this is a “warts and all” presentation, with slowdown, glitches, et all still present and accounted for.

When playing solo to improve your best times, you’ll usually be looking at two screens (unless you opt against that in the options). The left shows your current run, the right your previous best run so you can see at a glance how you’re measuring up. There are some handy features built into the game, like an automatic rewind that kicks in when you die (beware though, it doesn’t rewind your timer). It’s a solid setup, but lacks a lot of options that would make it more appealing and versatile for those already into this kind of speedrunning gameplay. For instance, you can’t manually rewind your run if mess up a sequence, your only option is to start the whole challenge over again. Also, in addition to not being able to play through whole games, you have no way to stake out your own unique challenges. The 150-some included in the package is all you get.

The limitations of NWC: NES Edition extend to its online component. While having “World Championships” in its title would seem to imply the game has a direct competitive element, it’s not really the case. World Championships Mode presents a series of five challenges, refreshed every week, that you can work towards perfecting your times in. When the deadline arrives, your place on the leaderboards will be revealed, but until then, you won’t know. While I suppose this approach may keep people coming back to the game, I’d personally prefer a simple leaderboard for each of the game’s challenges.

Survival Mode somewhat simulates the feeling of competition, although, in this case, you’re only going up against other players’ ghost data. You "compete" against 7 ghosts over three rounds, with half of the field with the worst times being eliminated after each challenge. If you want realtime competition, Party Mode, which is essentially a live, local version of Survival Mode, is actually your best bet. Party Mode is fun in a casual sort of way, but, realistically, your rivals probably aren't going to provide much challenge unless they also have the game and have been practicing.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition isn’t hurting for content, even if said content is nigh-on 40 years old, but I'm just not sure I see the long-term appeal of this package. Serious speedrunners will probably barely give the game a bemused glance, and for Nintendo's $30 asking price, more casual players could get a 12-month Nintendo Switch Online subscription and play full versions of all these games as much as they’d like, which feels like more of a winning strategy to me.

This review was based on a copy of Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition provided by publisher Nintendo.

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WCCFTECH RATING

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition presents a promising concept, but a lack of features to support either dedicated speedrunners or any sort of serious online competition limits the package's appeal. There's certainly fun to be had revisiting this lineup of golden oldies, but Nintendo has only scored a bronze at the Nostalgia Olympics this time around.