I have an infinite love for the NES. I’ve played through most of the console’s catalog, so I’m always looking for recent ways to experience it in recent ways. A little competition never hurts.
If you don’t know, the Nintendo World Championships is a competition that took place in the United States (which isn’t really the whole world) in 1990. People from all over the country competed in qualifying rounds, hoping to make it to the finals at Universal Studios Hollywood.
Nintendo has since returned to the concept from time to time, hosting updated versions of the Nintendo World Championships in 2015 and 2017.
Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition is more or less a home version of the idea, allowing you to compete against other players from around the world or on your couch in a different selection of challenges each week. It’s the same idea with less excitement.
Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition (Switch)
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: July 18, 2024
Suggested retail price: $29.99
Let me make it clear right away: Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition is a speedrunning game. It is not an alternative to NES Remixwhich featured speedrunning challenges alongside additional challenges that actually changed up the gameplay in sometimes inventive ways. These are NES games presented as untouched wastelands; exactly as they were in the 80s and 90s, but you have to play them as swift as you can.
Most importantly, it’s focused on competition. You can play it alone, but it’s most fun in multiplayer, whether you’re competing head-to-head or not.
There’s a purely single-player mode where you’re given a growing selection of game segments that rank you based on your time. If that’s what you’re looking for, though, I wouldn’t recommend it. Most (not all) of the challenges are cut from the first few stages of the games they represent. I don’t know about you, but I’ve played the 13 included games multiple times over the years, so it wasn’t strenuous to get through the challenges offered, even without a lot of speedrunning experience.
Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition was a strange one to review. When I started, online modes weren’t available, and the servers went live just a few days before the embargo. The time frame wasn’t an issue, but it clearly wasn’t designed for anyone to just speedrun.
Each recent speedrun challenge is unlocked by spending coins. However, the coins you get for completing a challenge are consistently much lower than the cost of unlocking it. If you manage to get an S rank on your first try, your winnings still won’t cover the unlock of the next challenge. In order to complete them, I had to start grinding challenges to build up a supply of coins. It wasn’t a perfect experience.
The situation was different when the servers went live. There are two online modes: World Championships and Survival.
The World Championship is pretty straightforward. There are a selection of games that you can play multiple times to try and get the fastest time. Then, on a specific day, you are compared to different categories to see how well you did.
Survival mode is more like offline multiplayer. You compete against seven other players for the fastest time in three rounds. The selection of games is predetermined and divided into two divisions, and games are rotated after a certain date.
Survival mode is not a live competition. The runs are done by real players, but you only fight their ghosts. This means that you can repeat the division until you come across a group of players who all fail the tasks. This also means that if you come across a player who is a real speedrunner, you can try your luck again to get a group of higher-level dilettantes. I know that when I saw a player finish Super Mario Bros. 2 jumping through Beezos made my blood run frosty. That’s okay, because Survival mode is more for your own entertainment as a replacement for local multiplayer.
And that’s pretty much it. There are tons of speedruns across the 13 included games. The World Championships change every week, meaning there’s always something to do. But that “always” is always speedruns.
Interestingly, that’s not how even the real Nintendo World Championships worked. The real events were based on points, with modified versions of the games included, while NES Edition is entirely time-based. Considering the mission is to bring the Nintendo World Championships experience to people who couldn’t experience it, it’s a bit of an odd decision to make it strictly a speedrun challenge. I assume it was formatted this way so Nintendo could automate the competition, but there are probably more imaginative ways to do it.
It seems to require very little effort. There are some nice touches, such as audience audio during competitive play, unlockable pins and avatars, and other ways to introduce yourself to your rivals, such as the ability to select your favorite game from all the officially released titles in the NES and Famicom libraries. Another more notable addition is the strategy guides that you can review for the final challenge in each game. While they aren’t always necessary, they offer hints for the challenges in a format that’s reminiscent of the strategy guides of venerable.
But as far as the gameplay itself goes, it’s very uninteresting. There’s nothing really imaginative like some kind of campaign progression. You don’t get recent ways to experience the classics like NES Remix. If you’re not into speedrunning, all of these games are already available on the NES Nintendo Switch Online service. At least then you won’t be interrupted every few seconds.
The final product feels like something designed for a niche within a niche. It’s not something for NES fans, it’s something for speedrunning fans. Even then, it’s probably best suited for people who love speedrunning AND I have a immense group of friends who like retro style.
For everyone else, the competitions are fun; I just don’t think they hold anyone’s attention for very long. You can log in every week, give it your all, and then, I don’t know, play full games.
I think it would be better suited as an additional mode to some kind of NES Remix compilation. And that’s ignoring the fact that NES Remix 2 already had a mode based on the Nintendo World Championships. Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition is a tribute to the classic console, but devoid of emotion and too exclusive for its own good.
