I have endless affection for the NES. I’ve trodden on much of the console’s catalog, so I’m always looking for new ways to experience it in new ways. A little competition never hurts.
If you’re not familiar, the Nintendo World Championships was a competition held in the US (which isn’t actually the world) in 1990. People from around the country competed in qualifying rounds, hoping to reach the finals in Universal Studios Hollywood.
Since then, Nintendo occasionally circles back to the concept, having held updated versions of the Nintendo World Championships in 2015 and 2017.
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is more-or-less the home version of the idea, allowing you to compete with other players 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 Championships: NES Edition (Switch)
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: July 18, 2024
MSRP: $29.99
Let me be clear right off the hop: Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a speedrunning game. It’s not an alternative to NES Remix, which had speedrunning challenges alongside additional challenges that actually changed gameplay around in sometimes inventive ways. These are NES games presented as untouched wilderness; exactly as they were back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but you have to play them as fast as possible.
Most importantly, it’s competition focused. You can play by your lonesome, but it’s most entertaining in its multiplayer, whether you’re competing directly or not.
There’s a purely single-player mode where you’re given a growing selection of game excerpts that grade you based on your time. However, if that’s what you’re looking for, I wouldn’t recommend it. Most (not all) of the challenges are clipped from the first few stages of the games they represent. I don’t know about you, but I’ve played the 13 included games repeatedly throughout the years, so it wasn’t difficult burning through the offered challenges, even without much speedrunning experience.
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition was a weird one to review. When I started, the online modes weren’t available, and the servers only went up a couple of days before the embargo. The timeframe wasn’t a problem, but it obviously wasn’t designed for someone to just play the speedrun mode.
Each new challenge in speedrun mode is unlocked by spending coins. However, the coins you get back for completing a challenge are invariably much less than it costs to unlock one. If you pull off an S-rank on your first try, your winnings still won’t cover unlocking the next challenge. In order to get through it, I had to start grinding challenges to build up my coin stockpile. It wasn’t an ideal experience.
It was a different story once the servers went up. There are two online modes: World Championships and Survival.
World Championships is pretty straightforward. There’s a selection of games represented that you can play repeatedly to try and get the fastest time possible. Then, at a specified date, you’re compared against different categories to see how well you did.
Survival mode is more like the offline, multi-player party mode. You’re stacked up against seven other players to compete for the fastest time across three rounds. The game selection is pre-determined and set into two divisions, with the games rotated out after a certain date.
Survival mode isn’t a live competition. The runs are done by real players, but you’re only facing off against their ghosts. This means that you can keep retrying a division until you get a set of players who all fumble the events. This also means that if you get placed against a player who is an actual speedrunner, you can try your luck again for a set of dilettantes more your level. I know that when I saw a player complete a Super Mario Bros. 2 by hopping across Beezos, my blood ran cold. That’s fine, as Survival mode is more for your own entertainment as a stand-in for the local multi-player.
And that’s largely it. There are plenty of speedruns across the 13 included games. The World Championship changes weekly, meaning there’s always something to do. But that “always” is always speedruns.
What’s interesting is that this wasn’t even how the real Nintendo World Championships even worked. The real events were score-based, featuring tweaked versions of the games, whereas NES Edition is entirely time-based. Considering its mission statement is to bring the experience of the Nintendo World Championships to people who weren’t able to experience them, it’s a bit of a strange decision to just make them solely speedrun challenges. I assume it was formatted this way so Nintendo could automate the competitions, but there are probably more creative ways to have done this.
It feels very low effort. There are some nice touches, like the sound of an audience while you’re playing in competition, unlockable pins and avatars, and other ways to introduce yourself to your competitors, such as the ability to choose your favorite game from all the officially released titles across the NES and Famicom libraries. Another more appreciable extra is the strategy guides that you can view for the last challenge in each of the games. While, they’re not always necessary, they offer challenge-specific hints in a format that evokes strategy guides of old.
But when it comes to actual gameplay, it feels very drab. There’s nothing really creative, like some sort of campaign progression. You don’t get new ways to experience the classics like NES Remix. If you’re not into speedrunning, then all of these games are already available on Nintendo Switch Online’s NES service. At least then, you won’t be interrupted every few seconds.
The end product feels like something that’s for a niche within a niche. It’s not something that is for fans of the NES, it’s for fans of speedrunning. Even then, it’s probably most on target with people who love speedrunning and have a large group of retro-minded friends.
For everyone else, the competitions are enjoyable; I just don’t see them holding anyone’s attention for long. You can log in each week, do your best, and then, I don’t know, go and play the full games.
It feels like it would fit better as an additional mode to some sort 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 celebration of the classic console; it’s just one that lacks excitement and is too exclusive for its own good.
[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]
Published: Jul 17, 2024 07:00 am