I’ve always looked at video game speedrunners with equal parts awe and bemusement. The skill that goes into watching a pro blast through a game at an unfathomable pace is nothing short of impressive, but it’s the time, dedication, and heartache that truly separates the Mario Bros. from the Mario Boys. For many, myself included, getting into the world of speedrunning seriously just isn’t feasible or achievable. Enter the Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition.
This new Nintendo package was produced with two clear goals. The first is to play on the nostalgia that people feel for the company’s productions in the 80s and early 90s, and in particular to pay homage to real The Nintendo World Championships were first held in 1990. The other goal is to give players a taste of the thrills of speedrunning and competition in a more accessible, approachable, and digestible way. With these ideas in mind, Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is almost a complete success with a little room for improvement.
The experience here is pretty straightforward. In the default single-player option, Speedrun mode, you’ll take on a series of over 150 speedrun challenges based on clips from 13 different NES classics. Things start out relatively simple: you might be asked to collect the first Super Mushroom in the original Super Mario Bros. as quickly as possible, or defeat all the enemies in a room in The Legend of Zelda in record time, while layer challenges can include entire levels or even the entire experience of a game. You’re graded on your performance, and based on that grade, you’re awarded coins to spend on other challenges.
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The mix of games and challenges is pretty good. Each game’s leaderboard feels like a steady progression that serves to both highlight the different mechanics and quirks of a game that the speedrunning community should master in the real world, as well as prepare you for the more difficult stages to come. There are certainly a few games that feel underserved or just aren’t as fun in context, like Excitebike and Balloon Fight, and nearly a third of the lineup is Super Mario Bros. titles, but the specific moments in each are generally pretty fun to tackle. The Legendary Challenges are the highlights and aren’t worth spoiling, but the fact that they also come with “classified information” formatted like an old-school guide is a wonderful touch.
In fact, the entire presentation, while perhaps not filled with Nintendo’s typical “charm,” is clean and well thought out. When tackling one of the games in Speedrun mode, you can either have a single-screen view or look at your previous attempts side-by-side to see where you did well or poorly. All challenges begin with a look at the CPU running a near-perfect attempt (you’ll have to figure out the hidden and tricky paths to the legendary S-Ranks on your own), and you’ll occasionally get some extra help from overlays on the game screen that will guide you through some of those esoteric and twisty paths that are iconic to classic game design.
Once you’ve honed your skills in the single-player Speedrun mode, there are also a few different options for competing against others. A dedicated Party mode lets up to eight players on one console take on challenges in tandem, either individually or as part of curated packages themed around one or more games. With a big enough group (and a TV), it can be quite entertaining to watch eight simultaneous attempts at bite-sized runs, and makes for a surprisingly good party game, especially when the points even out and the final, thrilling, electric bit is a 10-second clip from Kirby’s Adventure.
Online, there are two more modes. The first is World Championship, which features a weekly rotation of five challenges of varying difficulty, which you can play as many times as you like during that week to record your best times in the hopes of securing a top spot when the results are finally revealed. The second is Survival, which pits you against the online ghost data of seven other players in an asynchronous elimination bracket, over the course of three challenges. Both modes are fun in their own way, if only in short bursts before the inevitable wait for the next week’s rotation, but Survival is certainly where the competitive spirit shines, even if you’re not In fact play against other players in real time. The added touch of cheering crowd sound in the background of online modes is also a nice touch.
And of course, online play requires additional customization and a way to show off your accomplishments. That’s why NWC: NES Edition features player profiles with things like unlockable player icons and a catalog of pins recognizing your accomplishments across the various modes. The pin designs are pretty neat, and the player icons feature sprites from all the included games, so unlocking and purchasing everything is a nice incentive to keep playing, but there’s also some “museum”-style content, especially around real The Nintendo World Championships would have been a great way to spend the multitude of coins you’ll earn in the various modes. There’s a lot of story here, and speedrunning itself is a really interesting category that this game seems to want to introduce to a wider audience, so this feels like a lot of missed opportunities.
And that’s really the game’s biggest problem: there just isn’t enough to keep players engaged beyond committing to both online modes for a few minutes a week or the occasional group game, and even then the appeal can quickly fade. This is especially true when you consider that we’ve seen this before with the NES Remix packs on Wii U and 3DS, the latter of which even had its own version of the NWC, all of which offered more games, more challenges, and more just Speedrunning. As a $50 title, I would have hoped for a bit more content.