God, Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is so frustrating. I come this close to absolutely loving this assortment of timed challenges from NES games. In many ways, it feels like it was designed specifically for NES nerds like me, people with an enduring fondness not only for well-regarded classics like The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. but also for the rawer, more frustrating first-party games from Nintendo’s first console, like Ice Climber. But one huge, glaring flaw holds it back, relegating it to the status of an interesting curiosity rather than the conversation- and competition-friendly release it could have been.
Let’s start with some of the things I really like about this game. First (and least) I think the Deluxe Box Set Nintendo is selling is pretty cool. It comes with a set of pins, postcards with the covers of all the games featured in Championships, and a gold NES cartridge (strictly decorative). Nintendo is paying homage to itself, sure, but it’s a nicely done assortment of goodies for a price well below typical “special edition” prices.
Now, let’s move on to the game itself. Nintendo Championships is essentially a series of challenges that let you play through moments from classic NES games and try to complete a given objective as quickly as possible. These challenges range from the very short and simple (grabbing the sword at the beginning of The Legend of Zelda) to the much more difficult (beating Super Mario Bros.), and I think the structure of the game is wonderful. The way it starts by asking you to do the simplest things gives you a sense of how important every little move is. Experience teaches you that precious milliseconds can be gained or lost on something as basic as the angle of a jump.
In that respect, it feels like a veritable gateway to the joys of speedrunning. When you tackle one of the game’s more elaborate challenges that require you to complete an entire level or even an entire game, you inherently understand that it’s about putting all the pieces together, trying to pull off each move as gracefully and efficiently as you did the moves in the much smaller challenges you started with. I’ve probably played Super Mario Bros. World 1-1 hundreds of times in my life, and yet the Nintendo World Championships pushed me, for the first time in my life, to really focus on completing it as quickly as possible, and it felt like a completely different level. Simply completing 1-1 is easy as pie. Completing it really quickly and efficiently? That takes practice and determination. On several occasions, the Nintendo World Championships have excited me by giving me new and exciting ways to approach games that I’ve been intimately familiar with for most of my life, and I think I’ll continue to have fun coming back for a while and trying to improve my ranking in some of the game’s many challenges.
But here’s where we get to the game’s biggest oversight. Do you know what would have made me (and, I think, thousands of other players) that much more in love with these challenges, and that much more determined to come back again and again to improve our times? The leaderboards. Especially the friend leaderboards. Look, if I knew that one of my friends had gotten the Screw Attack power-up in Metroid 0.03 seconds faster than me, you can bet I’d be obsessed with doing it over and over again until I beat his time. For me, this game could have been the most popular source of online competition since Pac-Man Championship Edition burst onto Xbox Live in 2007. And you know what else Pac-Man CE had to offer besides the leaderboards that helped make it such a competitive sensation? The ability to watch replays of your friends’ games, to identify exactly how they beat you by 125,000 points.

There’s absolutely no reason why Nintendo World Championships shouldn’t feature both leaderboards and replays for its challenges. We already know that the game stores replay data! One of its modes is called Survival Mode, and it pits you against the ghost replays of seven other players in races to complete three challenges. Okay, Nintendo. So you have that damn data. Please, let me watch my friends’ best attempts at completing a Donkey Kong loop, or beating Mouser in Super Mario Bros. 2. Speedrunning is as much about cooperation and information sharing as it is about competition, and even if you see how a friend shaved five seconds off their time in a given challenge, you still have to execute the technique. It’s absurd that I have to use Twitter to share information like this with my friends and other players, instead of allowing them to simply watch my replay in-game.
Of course, I speak as a die-hard NES fan here, but my goodness, this misstep from Nintendo is so crushing. I truly believe that NWC could and should have been a game that brought people together and had us enthusiastically competing in its countless challenges for many weeks. It could have been one of the games of the summer. Instead, because Nintendo failed to implement any meaningful online features, it’s an experience that we can only truly enjoy in isolation. It’s an oversight that, to me, is so mind-boggling that I have a hard time believing it. I keep expecting Nintendo to announce that they’re rolling out a patch to support challenge-specific leaderboards and the ability to watch friends’ replays. But I doubt that’s actually going to happen. This is Nintendo, a company that, for all its genius, has often been very late to the game when it comes to figuring out what to do with online features.

To be fair, there is ONE online leaderboard in the game, in the aptly named World Championships mode. Each week, you and players from around the world compete in a series of five challenges, and when the week is over, you’re shown how you stack up against everyone else. That’s all well and good, but it just doesn’t feel like enough. I don’t want to just compete against the masses once a week. I want to have a lively discussion with my closest friends while we all obsessively try to be the fastest to catch the first mushroom in Super Mario Bros. or beat Ridley in Metroid. God, this is such a letdown. My only hope is that the title of this game, Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, hints that we might see more entries in the future, a SNES edition, maybe an N64 edition, etc., and that in the meantime, Nintendo decides to add the features that this game is so lacking.