Speedrunners are an elite group of people who dedicate a significant amount of time to chip away at their favourite games. They do their best to beat a game as fast as humanly possible. Constantly applying new strategies, honing their skills, and adjusting their routing. I’ve always been extremely into this community. There was a time in my life where I decided I wanted to speedrun Bioshock Infinite, and I spent a good month or so learning the route and shaving down my time. Eventually I got tired of the randomness and precision in that game, and I decided it wasn’t for me. Maybe I could have improved my muscle memory if I had some sort of way to quickly replay the same section over and over again.
What’s that? Nintendo released a game full of classic NES titles that allows you to practice speedrunning sections of their games? That’s right! Bioshock Infinite didn’t hear my prayers, but Nintendo did!
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition (say that three times fast) is a compilation of 13 classic NES games. However these are not the full games, but they are small sections taken from each that require you to do certain challenges as fast as possible. How many seconds would it take you to destroy 9 blocks in 1-2 of Super Mario World? How fast can you get to and then beat Kraid in Metroid? What about that first mushroom in 1-1 of Super Mario World? I’m sure you’ve collected that thing many times before. Can you beat your time? Down to the millisecond? These are only 3 of the 156 challenges you can tackle here in this compilation. Some of them are extremely inventive, some are stupid, some are super basic, and some are pretty difficult.
Some of the games featured really lend themselves to being played ad nauseam. Much like WarioWare, the best challenges here are the short and fast paced ones. A challenge that can be finished in mere seconds makes repetition feel more enjoyable. Games like Super Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros 2, and Metroid move fairly fast paced and are just a genuine joy to play even in these small chunks. However, slower paced games like Kirby’s Adventure, Ice Climbers and Balloon Fight just don’t have the fun/competitive factor that their speedier contemporaries do.
Potentially the most frustrating thing about Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is that it’s meant to be played on the Nintendo Switch’s Joy-Con controllers. Nobody is going to be breaking any world records with these controllers. They are just too small and don’t provide the comfort or precision necessary to consistently get the pixel-perfect strategies needed to score better times. I’ve always defended the Joy-Cons; however, the analog sticks are just not suited for these older games. They aren’t responsive and simply cannot be piloted at the rate that the classic button-pressing style D-pad on the original NES controller could. Thankfully, dying in this game only puts you back a few seconds and let’s you immediately try again. It’s not like you’re being sent back to the main menu or being kicked out of the game after you’ve died. Controls might be frustrating, but at least the game attempt to remedy it by letting you quickly do it all again. Control-wise, the Pro-Controller is a better bet for most of the games featured, but it’s undeniable that the original NES controller is by far and away the best way to play these games.
Most of the games in Nintendo World Championships: NES are not available as full games. What you’re getting here is spliced ROMs with standards you must meet in order to beat them. As you beat the challenges for each game you unlock new cosmetics, other challenges, and things like that. Various pins and pixelated avatars for your profile to show off your game and challenge of choice. If you master an entire game’s library then you unlock a legendary challenge. Legendary challenges can be anything from beating a dungeon in Zelda II all the way to beating the entirety of Super Mario Bros. I haven’t yet completed every single challenge, so there is a possibility you can unlock other entire games. Unfortunately there aren’t any sort of mods or adjustments to the games that you can unlock. Imagine being able to double jump in Super Mario Bros., or being able to add aesthetic graphical filters to any of these games. What if you could play as Samus in Ice Climbers? These are things that would really spice up the less than enjoyable challenges available, and would overall make the package a lot more interesting. The unlocks generally feel a little underwhelming, and I wish they explored this a lot more.
I could absolutely go and get the rest of the microgames I haven’t unlocked by playing the very generous-with-points online modes. There are a couple online modes available, and they are both great for earning points to unlock games and cosmetics. There’s World Championship and Survival Mode. World Championship is a weekly mode that provides everyone with the same five microgames to play. You can battle the rest of the planet to see who will get the best times on the leaderboard. I really liked how the leaderboard compares you with people who are born in the same year as you. It’s nice knowing there are other 28 year olds who kind of suck at these older games like me. At least I don’t have to stare at all the times placed by better-than-me NES old-heads and the younger freaks of nature stomping me effortlessly. I actually thought this was a really interesting way to handle leaderboards and I’d like to see this implemented in other games. What’s annoying is that they do not unveil the rest of the leaderboard until the week is over. It’s a strange decision to hide that from you and it sort of fizzles the hype of the competition in my opinion.
If World Championship isn’t quite competitive enough you could try Survival Mode. Survival is exactly what it sounds like – you have to survive. This is an elimination style mode where you play against the ghost data of other players from all over the world. Each time you play you have to complete the same three microgames in random order. These games, much like World Championship Mode, cycle on a weekly basis. The difference is that you don’t have to wait a full week to see your results, you get them immediately, which is nice. It’s strange to me that they only allow you to play a handful of microgames online. You don’t get to pick your favourite, you just have to wait and see what they pick for the whole world to play. One week you might get do terribly because the RNG gods hate you. Another week you might have two games featured that you absolutely crush at. Overall I think this approach could use some work.
There’s a lot to like in Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, as well as a few gameplay design decisions that had me confused. Ultimately, this serves as a completely fine way to experience these classic games. Some of them are better than others, and some of them are among the best games of all time. If you’re looking for some bite-sized entertainment that focuses on beating your personal best times over and over again, then look no further. The online implementation feels more limiting than fun, and not being able to select specific challenges that you want to play is just straight up annoying. Of course, every game here is a classic to somebody and they’re all at least fun to revisit for a while. A lot of love has gone into the presentation here. The terrific pixelated graphics, the classic music, and overall fun gameplay remains, even if for just a few seconds at a time. I just cannot get behind paying $40 CAD for this product. There are literally hundreds of ways to play these games without spending anywhere near that amount AND you can play them in full. I can only really recommend this title for the most staunch classic Nintendo enthusiasts.
