Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition (2024)

I was waiting to write this up until I was done-done, but I think I'm realizing that I think I've already moved on for now, so I'll get this done, make it official and maybe come back to it at some point. I have 4 more Legendary A++ to get to S and getting through at least a full run of the Legendary Gauntlet or whatever it was called for me to feel done-done, but I've just lost the motivation.

That said, for what this 'game' is, it's right up my alley. I really enjoyed NES Remix, and this is pretty much that, except less quirky remixing, and maybe a better online leaderboard situation. I wasn't really in it for the online leaderboards, as those are just going to reset and ultimately be best for people who have more time than I do to continue to grind out the extra frames.

Of course, I wish there were more to do. Maybe they are considering more NES versions, maybe they are considering SNES Edition, etc, I don't know. I don't think I wanted these challenges to be harder, but maaaany were pretty easy to S-rank, so I guess just more would be nice. SMB3 had a lotttt of challenges but then Excitebike only had like 5. That seemed like a weird balance.

But for something to just pick up for a few minutes if I had it to try for a few extra milliseconds in some challenges, or sit down and focus on some of the longer/harder ones, it filled a good space for a while, but eventually petered out. Maybe I'll come back to the few I have left, but I feel like I got a lot more done than I actually thought I would for a while there. Just gotta keep at it.

I had never played a few of these games, like Kid Icarus or ExciteBike, so it was an interesting little demo of those as well.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a typical Nintendo online game experience. It's a good idea with solid presentation BUT with some headscratching omissions and decisions.

This is a game about speedrunning parts of NES games. Nothing more, nothing less. There's 150 challenges across 13 games. Some challenges are tens of seconds long, a few are minutes long, most are seconds long. The focus on short challenges makes this a lot more suitable for a party game. The majority of challenges are so short that it's easy to grasp what they are about and get cracking fast times pretty much immediately.

If you are playing alone, you can tackle the 150 challenges separately or take part online in "survival mode" or dive into the championships. In survival mode, you race against other users' ghost data and try to do as well as you can in a set of three challenges. The championships are basically five different weekly challenges that you try to get a good time in and then, at the start of the next week, you'll see how well you did globally and withing you age group. If you are playing with a friend, you have two options: tackling individual challenges or then playing "party mode" where you can select one of several challenge packs to play through. Getting first position nets you most points and so on, and at the end of the challenge pack, you'll see who was the party champ.

I played this with my friends last weekend and both the weekly championship and party mode were really fun local multiplayer experiences. Although, I got to add that we had a quite unusual setup to actually play the weekly championship all at the same time: we had four Switches and four screens.

As you can probably deduce from the game modes, Nintendo World Championships is not the most versatile experience out there. That's not to say this is a bad game. It's really addicting trying to top your (or your friends' time), and the party mode in local multiplayer is a hoot. On top of that, the game's presentation nails this hype speedrunning feel really well. The menu music is pumping 80s training montage music, there's excited crowd noises in the online modes, UI is slick, it's fun collecting achievement pins... There's a lot of good stuff here.

Unfortunately though, the game drops the ball in very weird spots. For example, there's no ranking lists. The only rankings you see are the weekly championship results. No global rankings, no friend list rankings, not even personal rankings. Global rankings I can give or take since I have no business near the top but not having friend list rankings is a stupid omission. This would have made for a brilliant social online game experience if there was friend rankings coupled with some kind of notifications when booting the game if your friend had beat your time. Also, there's no online multiplayer with friends either. Additionally, I would have liked to have some extra challenges after beating the game, like beating the whole games as you see fit. As it stands, there is only one 'full game' speedrun and that is SMB. You do unlock a special mode after beating the game but that really didn't entice me to try it.

I also fear that the game doesn't have much longetivity when for someone playing alone. Clearing the 150 challenges doesn't take that long and the weekly championships and survival mode are fun and all but it's pretty much the same stuff week after week. I really hope this game gets some updates or events to make it fresh again but it's Nintendo we're talking about so most likely not.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a fun but limited experience. It's nice to see a smaller experimental game from Nintendo but this could have been more.

I am entirely on the fence about Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, a game I enjoyed playing, but still a game where I found myself questioning the choices this was making at every turn. I'm still working my way through how I feel about this, so let me make it your problem by figuring it out in review form!

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition almost feels like Nintendo trying to teach speedrunning to players, but doing so in a way that doesn't feel like any speedrun I've ever watched. There are about a dozen longer levels that do feel more in line with speedrunning, such as seeing how fast you can beat the entirety of Super Mario Bros. or Donkey Kong, but mostly, these are bite-sized chunks of games where you have to beat a boss, or do a simple task like find a key or a mushroom. These take seconds to accomplish, with little more to do than shave a few milliseconds off your existing time. At the very least, this allowed me to play games I've played for decades in an entirely new way, but some of these games just aren't made for this type of gameplay, and it shows. Sorry, I don't want to speedrun through Kirby or Kid Icarus.

However, it did make me want to play these classics in their entirety. For the first time EVER (I know, I'm an idiot), I was able to beat Super Mario Bros. after playing this game. I've always brushed off Zelda II, but this made me appreciate its strengths. And man, I've got to try Kid Icarus out, because that game seems way harder than I always assumed. I'm sure this game mostly exists to get people signed up for Nintendo Online, and this would absolutely work for me.

It's also strange to me how isolated each of these events are. You can't make playlists or these missions and run through them, or do a run of a single game's events back-to-back. You're basically left navigating menus after each mission, and I truly wish there was an almost WarioWare-esque way to play through a bunch of rapid-fire missions. This seems like a no-brainer to me, and especially once all these missions are completed, this would be an excellent way to keep up the replayability.

Similarly, the online component of this is absurdly restrictive. You compete against other playthrough ghosts, but only from a selection of three levels. And this only changes once a week?? I'm not sure why they didn't turn this into a more active, fast-paced experience, like a Tetris 99 or Mario 99 (and frankly, this probably should've been a free download akin to those games as well), and why you can only do this with a few select missions each week. Again, this feels like a strange way to hold the game back that doesn't seem to serve any purpose.

I played this for close to a week, and with very little difficulty, I was able to get an A rank or higher on every mission, and I was left feeling like there was no reason for me to continue playing this game. I enjoyed myself, but I kept hoping more options on how to play this would unlock, and those options never came. This truly feels like is should've been a free download to drum up interest in Nintendo Online than a full-blown game. I'll keep coming back for the weekly(?!?!?!) online challenges, and holding out hope that there might be an update to this game in the near future to add some more possibilities, or at the very least, an SNES Edition that gives more options. But it's not a good thing when you play a game, and all you can think about is the many ways it could've been better.