Switch your switch to analogue and return to the golden age of gaming in our Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition review!

Ah, the 1980’s. Big hair, shoulder pads, leg warmers, and acid-wash jeans. What a fantastic decade (for fashion at least). So many other amazing things were created in the 1980s as well – Walkman cassette players, MTV and of course… Me. Oh, and the Nintendo Entertainment System! The console that single-handedly saved and rejuvenated the videogame industry with classic games like Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda was born over 40 years ago (just like me)!

Thank you, Nintendo, for the reminder that I am indeed old.

Back in the day, Nintendo themselves ran multiple events around the world called ‘Nintendo World Championships’. Gamers would challenge each other to see who the best was at getting a high score, OR at finishing with the fastest time. Classic 80’s film (filmed in the 80’s but released in 1990) showed us an example of this event, and hammed it up like only the 80’s could.

This remains one of the best movie posters of all time.

Despite the World Championships ending a long time ago and NES games being between three and four decades old, there are still plenty of people who play these games competitively. Speedrunning is a way to ‘metagame’ old videogames by racing for the fastest time. Nintendo is now formally jumping on the trend with Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition.

Can this conglomeration of classic games complete with contemporary consoles?

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition Review – Story

After his little brother, Jimmy (Luke Edwards), is put in a mental institution, Corey (Fred Savage) breaks him out and the pair run off together to California. On their travels, Corey meets a girl named Haley (Jenny Lewis) and discovers that Jimmy is a master at playing video games.

Wait, that is the plot of the movie The Wizard.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition does not have any story whatsoever… Let’s move on to gameplay!

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition Review – Gameplay

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition contains a collection of 13 different classic NES titles where you can challenge yourself to be the very best (being the NES, there are no Pokémon games though). Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition has a good overall selection of games, but it is a little bit too Mario and Zelda-focused. Both Zelda games and FOUR Mario games are represented here (SMB, SMB 2, The real SMB 2 a.k.a Lost Levels and SMB 3). Other classics that demanded a position are here in Donkey Kong, Kid Icarus, Metroid and Kirby. Ice Climbers is a bit of a left-field choice, but I appreciate its presence here, and ExciteBike is an excellent choice for a ‘speedrun’ game. The final game is probably the strangest choice in ‘Balloon Fight’.

Balloon Fight? What were you smoking Nintendo?

The available game selection is one of the first places where the game missteps a little. The library on the NES is massive and there are many classic titles. There are so many other great NES games that would be perfect for a title like this. I can only guess they wanted to choose Nintendo-developed games for licensing purposes.

The main mode where you will spend most of your time with the game initially is ‘Speedrun Mode’. Each of the 13 games has a bunch of short missions to complete – adding up to over 150 challenges overall. Performance is based on an arbitrary time scale (it is unclear how they decided what times were good and bad), with a score given on a ranking scale with ‘S’ rank being the best. There is no shortage of speedrun mode challenges. But the problem is – many of them are not fun to play more than once.

Over 150 challenges… but how many are actually worth your time?

It looks like a lot of levels, but many of these take literally less than 5 seconds to complete. Indeed, many of them last for literally two seconds or less! They are far too simple. Check these back-to-back challenges out:

The saving grace of Nintendo Championships is the set of ‘Legend-difficulty’ challenges available – one for each title covered in the game. These missions are the ‘final boss’ for each game and are usually much longer time investments than the extremely short ‘tutorial’ missions that came before. Much longer than 5 seconds isn’t hard, but most of these are between 1 and 5 minutes in length.

The best part of these are the ‘Classified Information’ pages provided to give you the hints and tips needed to gain the elusive S rank.

Without the map, there is no way I would have remembered how to do this

Unfortunately, it isn’t just the relatively poor mission choices that let this title down. One of the most hyped parts of this game, particularly for me, was the promise of challenging online competition with other gamers both old and young from around the world. But we didn’t really get that, at least not in the way you would think. ‘Online’ gameplay comes in two forms, and both of them fall short from what I was expecting after Nintendo’s massive successes with Tetris 99, Super Mario Bros 35 and F-Zero 99.

The first ‘mode’ is ‘World Championships’, where every few days a new set of 5 random missions are selected. During the championship period (lasting a few days) you can challenge these missions as often as you like to get your best score.

At the end of the Championship period, you will find out how you fared against the rest of the world with your best time. Both overall score and a ranking against other players your age (born in the same year as you) are provided!

I suppose it is interesting to see how you stack up against other people, but there isn’t anything different here to the base game other than receiving a ranking.

430th? I thought I was better than that amongst 40-year-olds… (Did you need to say how old I was when the game was released?)

The second mode is ‘Survival Mode’. Here you are matched up with 7 other players (8 in total) and need to progress through three knockout rounds of missions. Eight people drop down to four people after round one, with two players remaining after round two, and the winner crowned at the end of round 3. This sounds exciting…until you realise that you aren’t actually playing against other people live. Rather you are playing against ‘Ghost data’ only.

Did I mention that the quality of the ghost data is also quite bad? I mean, it wouldn’t be fun to be up against ‘S’ rank ghost data all of the time, but you have to be pretty bad to be getting ‘B’ rank scores and sometimes that is what you are pitted against.

Finally, there is the secret ‘Legendary Trial’ that is unlocked after you have completed all of the short missions with an A rank or better. This is an insane challenge where you must beat all of the ‘Legend’ challenges back-to-back with no break. Personally, I didn’t have the patience to try this, but if it sounds like fun to you, give it a go!

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition Review – Presentation

You’ve gotta give it to the Big N. They know how to polish up a game for immaculate presentation to the masses. The core games themselves look, sound and run exactly as they did on the NES. This is both a good and a bad thing. You get that authentic experience of playing the NES along with all the original bugs that us oldies experienced back in the day. Dropped frames, janky inputs and invisible sprites are exactly where they always were, and can be as frustrating as ever. The additional menus, sound effects and visuals that they have built to house this experience look great.

My favourite sections are the ‘Classified Information’ screens for the extremely hard ‘legend’ difficulty challenges. These feel like they are straight out of NES Era instruction manuals (again, if you are very young you might need to look up what that is), and I’m here for it. These look great!

There are definitely some other things that this game does extremely well. Being a game full of short (mostly far too short) speedrun challenges, the ability to quickly restart an attempt is essential. Fortunately, the quick press of L1 +R1 takes you back to the start of the 3, 2, 1 countdown. Watch out though, because you’ll get used to doing this in the 5 second levels, and then hate yourself for giving up too quickly on a longer challenge when a good score may have still been attainable.

Conclusion

I’m torn on this title. From the original announcement, I was excited to get my hands on something where I could test my skills online with the games I grew up with. But the majority of Nintendo World Championships’ missions are just abysmal wastes of time that are barely fun to play once, let alone repeatedly.

I need to climb a ladder? How riveting.

I do hope that this game can be expanded on with some form of ‘DLC’. Additional (GOOD!) challenges for the 13 included games, or even adding more games to the list would be greatly appreciated and significantly improve the package’s longevity. Whilst some of the best games on the NES are here there are plenty of amazing games that would have been perfect for this collection. Here are some of my personal suggestions:

• Punch Out – fast time to beat Glass Joe (or other more challenging fighters)
• Ninja Gaiden – jumping challenges and beating levels
• Bubble Bobble – beating various levels
• Tetris – fastest to get out of set levels, fastest to get a ‘Tetris’
• Megaman – seriously, anything from any Megaman! Beat levels, beat bosses. Please these games are speed running gold!

Even more important though would be making a true multiplayer experience with actual live online service to really drive that feeling of competition.

Hooray, I beat some other player’s ghost data. Whoop de doo.

For my mind, Nintendo does seem interested in expanding this series. The cleanly titled Nintendo World Championships: ‘NES Edition’ clearly points to the possibility of a future ‘SNES Edition’ and maybe an ‘N64 Edition’ as well. Hopefully Nintendo does see some of the feedback from myself and others about the areas where this game fails and improves on the formula in the future. Nintendo have shown us they do have an interest in online competitive gameplay with three absolutely great experiences over the past few years with Tetris 99, Super Mario Bros 35 and F-Zero 99. This title does have some promise, but unfortunately in its current state I would much prefer to play any of those three games rather than this.

So, why should you play Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition?

• Are you interested in the world of Speed running, but don’t know where to get started? This title is a great starting point.
• This collection provides a window back to some of the best games of the 1980s. That nostalgia feeling just can’t be beaten.

But, why shouldn’t you play Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition?

• If you have any experience in Speed Running, then what this title offers is unlikely to hold your attention for more than a couple of hours.
• Some of the old NES-era frustrations have been faithfully translated here for the worse. Dropped frames, janky inputs and invisible sprites are exactly where they always were.

Love your retro-inspired games as much as we do? Check out our review for Final Fantasy VI Pixel Remaster, or the amazing modern RPG Sea of Stars! We are always happy to talk retro games with you, particularly JRPGs… come join us on our Discord Server!