Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition Switch Review
Summary: Despite its limited appeal, there's plenty packed into Nintendo's speedrunning challenger - if you've got the patience for it.
3
Trial & Error
If anyone is going to milk 30+-year-old games it’s Nintendo. Maybe though, that says less about the red-hatted plumber’s ever-deepening pockets and more about the quality of Ninty’s back catalogue. After all, who doesn’t love revisiting the golden age of gaming, even if you’ve probably done it endless times before? But you’ll be disappointed if you’re hoping that Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition will be a simple walk down memory lane of Nintendo’s greatest hits. Disappointed, and very, very stressed.
It’s not the first time Nintendo has tried its hand at this type of thing; in fact, Nintendo World Championship: NES edition is something of a reboot itself. It’s essentially the Wii U’s NES Remix with a shiny coat and a focus on competitive play brought to life on Switch. Thirteen of Nintendo’s biggest hitters have been spliced and broken up into bite-sized time trials, with the emphasis placed on patience and skill rather than offering a complete gaming experience. There are no full games here, just clips of classics, with around 150 or so challenges to complete.
The lion’s share of screentime goes to the usual suspects like Mario and Zelda, but some of Nintendo’s lesser shouted-about titles get some screentime, with Kid Icarus, Excitebike and Ice Climber all receiving sets of challenges. The challenges themselves vary from painfully easy tasks like inhaling an enemy on Kirby as fast as possible, all the way to tough asks like quickly taking out all enemies in a round of Balloon Fight. Legendary difficult challenges take things even further, typically by asking players to reach the end of an entire level as quickly as possible.
But it’s not the challenges themselves that set just how taxing Nintendo Championship can be. Most gamers, after all, (and non-gamers alike, for that matter) will have no trouble grabbing the first mushroom in Super Mario Bros 1-1, but just how fast can you do it? It’s genuinely impressive stuff to check leaderboards to realise that, what you thought was a good time for a challenge, is, in fact, much slower than the times of your fellow gamers. There’s so much skill involved in shaving off precious seconds to achieve those much-sought-after top spots that it’s incredible to see what others can do. In perhaps my favourite feature of the whole game, when competing in World Championship matches, you can watch the attempts of others and see how they manage to reach the top spots. I genuinely found myself getting better and better at challenges by watching clips of others and trying to match their skills, and I was constantly in awe at how impressive these ultra-competitive speedrunners were at these otherwise simple challenges.
The idea of getting better and challenging yourself is spread heartily through Nintendo World Championships DNA, and even when not competing online, there are ample tools available to improve your skills. Once you’ve completed a challenge, your last play is shown on the screen while you go again, allowing you to see where you went wrong and, hopefully, improve. It’s a great system, being able to study what went wrong and what went right, but it’s a much better experience in docked mode, as squeezing two screens on the Switch’s measly handheld can prove a little difficult on the eyes.
Screen size can also be an issue with the game’s Survival Mode. Similar to World Championship rounds, you take on others to reach that prestigious top spot, but instead of competing separately, you go head-to-head with fellow competitors (or rather their previous plays) in knock-out style rounds. The issue is that the mode requires up to seven playthroughs to be on the screen at any one time, and while you can increase the size of your attempt to make it easier to see, I still found it quite visually quite distracting to have so much going on for a console where screen size is a premium.
Of course, taking part in online competitive play is likely not to be your first concern when loading up Nintendo World Championship for the first time, but rather, you’ll want to master as many challenges as you can. To unlock new challenges, you’ll have to spend coins earned through play, weirdly though, this is a system I found a little too generous. After a little over an hour’s play, I had enough coins to unlock almost all the challenges the game had to offer, and I couldn’t help but feel like this went against Nintendo World Championships ethos. I wanted a reason to go back, to practice more and more until I’d earned enough to test my stripes on another challenge, but by making levels so easy to unlock, it was difficult to find a reason to go back to challenges that I was struggling with. Lucky for me, coins have another use. There’s an ample amount of icons that can be purchased alongside tags to allow you to flex your personality, especially when playing online. I had great fun saving up to unlock my favourite Metroid character to sport in competitive, and coupled with a silly, pun-based motto, I really felt I could inject a little of me into my online persona.
The game has tonnes of nostalgic personality, and from earning pin badges for high-scoring a challenge to seeing how well I’ve competed against others from the year I was born, I found myself coming back to Nintendo World Championship again and again – but that’s not to say this is for everyone. In reality, the idea of trying over and over again to, say, shave off seconds from a particularly tricky jump in Metroid will likely not appeal to the masses and is more likely to frustrate than inspire. That said, for the price point, if you’ve even a passing interest in trying your hand at speedrunning alongside the best of the best, there’s ample content to warrant picking up, even if it’s just for curiosity’s sake.
NES classics are hardly critically endangered, and if you’re a gamer of a certain pedigree, you’ll likely have access to your favourite titles in this package already. Still, if you want to relieve those fond memories (or ruin them, as the case may be) then Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a fun challenge packed with nostalgic beats.
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