Back in 1990, The Nintendo World Championships were held. Held across 29 cities in the United States, players duked it out for the chance to win a trip to Los Angeles for the finals, where they would compete to win such prizes as savings bonds or a new convertible. Said finals involved a special NES cartridge with versions ofSuper Mario Bros.,Rad RacerandTetriswhere the goal was to get the highest scores possible in a limited amount of time. Special gold versions of those cartridges were given away by Nintendo Power, becoming the stuff of legends and going for upwards of six figures these days. While Nintendo would revisit the World Championships in 2025 and 2017, the 1990 Nintendo World Championships still feels like a key moment in gaming history. And now they return withNintendo World Championships: NES Edition…which asks you to basically ignore all of that.
Yes, these are the Nintendo World Championships in name only.Rad RacerandTetrisare MIA and the goal is no longer to get the highest score. Instead, it’s a set of 150 small speedrunning challenges taken from thirteen first-person NES games. And for those of you who were hoping for some sort of successor to theNES Remixgames, sorry, but the various twists and blends those games had aren’t here as well. It’s just straight up speedrunning challenges, where you just achieve a goal as quickly as possible, with no real variations on the gameplay (save for an automatic rewind in each challenge if you fail). It’s bare-bones in terms of variety, to say the least, and soNintendo World Championships: NES Editiondoesn’t make the greatest first impression.
Ready…Set…
Not helping it make a good first impression are its initial challenges. The basic single-player Speedrun Mode starts you off with one challenge for each of the games on Normal difficulty, then has you unlock more with coins earned in each run, eventually advancing to Hard, Master and Legend challenges. But the “Normal” challenges feel almost insultingly easy, involving such tasks as pulling up a single vegetable on a single screen inSuper Mario Bros. 2or inhaling the very first enemy you see inKirby’s Adventure.Yes, you want to start out by easing people into things, but it feels like speedrunning basic tutorials. And considering that Normal challenges have a rank of one star and Hard, Master and Legendary all have ranks of three, four and five stars, respectively, the lack of any two-star challenges makes one suspect that the “Normal” challenges were supposed to be “Easy.”
But once you get past the initial Normal challenges, things do pick up a bit. Brief as they are, the Hard and Master challenges can indeed provide fun bite-sized challenges, such as tackling whole levels or bosses, or even tasks like ascending Brinstar’s shaft in the originalMetroid(which a lot of people surprisingly seem to have difficulty with, if this game is any indication). It’s nothing mind-blowing, but it can be enjoyable. Then there are the Legend challenges, one for each game, serving as the grand finale of sorts. To illustrate this, they even come with best extras, those being miniature “Classified Information” strategy guides that provide hints on how actually traverse each course. They’re styles to look like something that wouldn’t be out of place in a Nintendo Power Player’s Guide, and add a nice bit of flavor to a game lacking a bit in the presentation area.
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The Legend challenges, however, also highlight one of the game’s issues, that being imbalances and biases when it comes to spreading out its challenges among all the games. The earlier, more arcade-style titles such asExcitebikeandIce Climberonly get six challenges each, while the main three Mario games get fifty challenges combined, a whole third of the package. AndSuper Mario Bros. 3alone gets twenty-four challenges, meaning a sixth of everything is devoted tooneNES game. As for the Legendary challenges,Super Mario Bros.dares you to speedrun the whole game (albeit using warps), while others such asKirby’s AdevntureandSuper Mario Bros.: The Lost Levelsonly challenge you to beat a single level for their Legend challenges, while others likeDonkey Konghave you just get past the three main screens.
Those Favored to Win…
Yes, certain games have structures that would make speedrunning the whole game take much longer than expected, but evenSuper Mario Bros. 3gets World 1 as its challenge. Some of them could have stood to be meatier, especially since some of the levels chosen feel random.The Lost Levelspicks Level 8-2 for seemingly no particular reason. Speaking of which, it only takes five minutes or so to beatSuper Mario Bros.using warps, but less than ten for the same withThe Lost Levels,so why not give it the same treatment? Sure, you could argueThe Lost Levelsis way harder, but isn’t one of the selling points of challenges such as the ones offered here the ability to develop our speedrunning skills?
SoNintendo World Championships: NES Editioncan be shallow at times, and with all of the goals for each challenge being similar, it doesn’t help that unless you feel the need to score an S rank on every challenge (not helped by the game feeling extremely generous with A grades), you’ll see virtually everything the game has to offer in about three hours or less. The only real rewards are pins to customize your profile (with only one pin at a time allowed), and different NES sprites to purchase using coins, which act as your profile picture (some cost several hundred or even a thousand coins, so prepare for grinding). And while not a reward, you’re able to also choose your favorite NES/Famicom game to display on your profile, which includes a list of every officially released game for the platform, which is a nifty touch.
But what are these profiles used for, you may ask? Why, that would beNintendo World Championships: NES Edition’sonline modes! Unfortunately, this being Nintendo, there’s still a ten-foot pole between them and full online play. Every week players get a different selection of five challenges, and can tackle them in Survival Mode or World Championships mode. The former is an eight-player elimination mode across three rounds, but unlike previous games such asF-Zero 99orTetris 99,you’re not playing against live opponents, just randomly-chosen previous runs by other players, which doesn’t feel the same and takes the form of eight tiny screens.
Still Fumbling With Online Hurdles
World Championships, meanwhile, just has you select each of the five challenges, play them as much as you want in a week, and your best time is recorded and submitted. Want to see how you and your friends are doing in these modes? Too bad. There are no live leaderboards, just those revealed at the end of the week, and the only clips you’re able to watch are those from the players who came in first. Look Nintendo, I get that toxicity in online gaming is sadly still a major issue, but it feels like your solution here downplays the actual competitive aspects. You can’t even compete with your friends online in the Party Mode, for two to eight players, which is local-only for no real reason.
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I actually didn’t want to be too hard onNintendo World Championships: NES Edition,but it doesn’t do much to try and earn a recommendation. there’s not much in the way of presentation that actually captures the mood of such an event, save for the neat virtual crowd noises in the online modes. And despite what some have said, it’s not really much of a history lesson as well. It’s just the same batch of NES games that Nintendo trots our every few years, cut up into small challenges. And that’s a shame, because the evolution of competitive gaming from score-based competitions such as this or even the high score lists in the back pages of classic gaming magazines to professional eSports and the modern speedrunning culture makes for fascinating material that can explore a variety of challenges. Or there’s just the fact that not many of us have ever experienced what the ultra-rare original 1990 cartridges have had, so the opportunity to preserve that bit of gaming history was here as well.
But no, the bitter irony is thatNintendo World Championships: NES Editiondoesn’t care about the actual Nintendo World Championships. No, what it cares about is merely the branding, a way to cash in on speedrunning and nostalgia, finding a way to sellthose precious physical Deluxe Sets.Whatever fun the game can provide is undermined by the fact everything just feels so slap-dash with little effort put in, revealing itself to be little more than a schedule filler, like last year’sEverybody 1-2-Switch!Maybe hardcore speedrunners can get a kick out of it, but everyone else should just use the money to get a year of basic Nintendo Switch Online, which includes all thirteen games and much more that you can speedrun in full to your heart’s content.
Closing Comments:
Nintendo World Championships: NES Editionis an interesting idea for a compilation, but it’s hard to enjoy when so much of it reveals a game that blatantly feels rushed, be it in its weak online modes or the uneven spread of challenges with little variety. There are definitely nice challenges here to tackle that put up a good fight, and hints of clever inclusions like the Classified Information guides, but there’s too little here at the moment to keep anyone hooked beyond a few hours at best. Sorry Nintendo, but this won’t even get you the bronze.
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition
Version Reviewed: Nintendo Switch
A compilation of bits from thirteen classic NES games, Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition contains 150 speedrunning challenges designed to see how speedy you are when it comes to various bits of classic gaming.
