Nintendo World Championships NES Edition

(available for Nintendo Switch only)

As a way to keep Nintendo fans happy in the final year of the Switch, Nintendo has decided to bring out a small package release which resurrects their Nintendo World Championship brand. Though an official competition hasn’t happened since 2017, Nintendo wants to replicate the speed running effects of that competition for everyone, using several games from the NES. The game boasts a total of over 150 challenges in over 13 NES games- which includes Super Mario Brothers 1-3, both the USA and lost level versions of 2, Zelda 1 and 2, Excitebike, Ice Climber, Balloon Fight, and Kirby’s Adventure. A decent selection of games, though a couple of them do stand out for me.

Obviously Nintendo didn’t want to include third parties, so they couldn’t reflect the original World Championships cartridges that were given out, which meant that they couldn’t include Tetris or Racer.

The number of challenges vary throughout games, with exception of the lost levels, the Mario games get a ton of challenges, whereas Excitebike only gets a measly 5 challenges. All of the challenges range from Normal Difficulty, to Hard, and then Master. Each game comes with a Legend challenge, as well as a guide on how to get it as quick as possible. For example, the Super Mario challenge is to beat the entire game in one go, and the guide lets you know which Warp Pipes you have to use to get to World 8 as quickly as possible, and beat the game. At the time of writing, the best time I managed for that challenge was 7 minutes and 7 seconds.

Your time is measured up to each millisecond, I noticed challenges where the ranks differed by 10 to 20 millisecond. The ranks range from C at the absolute lowest, to the highest which are A++ and S ranks- which are very hard to get.

The challenges really do range in time quality, for example, one of the first ones you unlock is to get the first mushroom in Super Mario- you’re looking at about 4 to 6 seconds for this one.

I would say your enjoyment of these will depend on your nostalgia for NES games. I don’t have much nostalgia for them, I didn’t really play them until I had a Wii and had access to the virtual console. But surprisingly, I was getting into some of the speedrunning aspects like beating my own time!

Your best time is saved, if you don’t achieve it in Single Player mode and instead get it in Championship or Survival mode- but not if you achieve it in Offline Party mode.

The game comes with Speedrun Mode, Survival Mode (which takes on an elimination moe with 7 other ghost players) and World Championship Mode, where you’ll be putting in your best time possible and then comparing that with the rest of the world- and it also gives a separate rank for people competing that were born in the same year as you.

PROS

• Emulation and Challenge Quality

As expected, the emulation quality is actually quite good. If you ever look at footage of WiiU virtual console NES games and Nintendo Switch Online NES games, you can definitely tell that the emulation quality has gone up.

As far as I’m aware, the NES Remix team has made this game, and they obviously know how to get the best out of these sprites. Though, unlike NES Remakes, they don’t have to go back and make a bunch of new assets for this.

As for the challenge quality, well, it ranges on which game you pick. But if you stick to the games you already like, the challenges are really good. They’re relatively simple and really reward people who play these games a lot. It’s also rather telling that most of my best times early on before I looked up tips to get better were for Kirby and Mario, because they were the NES games I’ve played the most.

Weirdly, I’d say that probably the best amount of top quality challenges that provide challenge and fun comes from Super Mario Brothers 2 USA, and because of it I gained a new appreciation for it.

That being said, there are a few games here that are from parts of Nintendo that make me wish they scrapped them or added some third party choices to take the edge off them being here- I’ll get to that in the CON section.

• Survival Mode

This is probably my favourite part of the game, as mentioned before, you’re playing an elimination round with seven other players Replays- this is to ensure that there isn’t any lag, which you can’t afford to have if your game is relying on speed running.

You compete with other players in a series of challenges that alternate every Monday, which is the same with the World Championship mode. The challenges do coincide with that mode as well.

It is split into two divisions- Gold Division and Silver Division. It obviously takes the replay data of people who have done well in the Gold challenges and the people who didn’t do quite (but not terrible!) as well for Silver. I certainly found it easier to win Silver.

Half of the players are eliminated each round- 4 players in the first round, 2 players in the second, and then you compete with the last one for the top spot.

Gold really took me a long time to earn since it had a challenge where I had to learn a couple of tricks to beat the Master Level challenge that came with it, but I managed to pull it off in the end. I kind of wish there was a way to do multiplayer with your friends, but as a whole, I think Survival Mode was a good compromise, and it was the one I felt was most addictive. There was a lot of risk and reward to it, and it could really sting when you get eliminated!

MIXED

• World Championship Mode

World Championship Mode is quite interesting, because the rankings are kept separate from the main game. Though if you do achieve a higher best time in that mode it does turn up as your personal best replay in Speedrun Mode.

Obviously, it was good fun because I did spend a lot of time trying to get the best possible time, which resulted in me getting the top 16 in 1990-born players for completing the first level of Super Mario Brothers in the shortest time, which required me replaying that level A LOT.

You will want to get in the top 20% of the World Championship modes, because one of the collectible pins is locked behind it.

I like the fact that players that have done very well will have to repeat their times in order to rank well on the board, but you actually have to wait to get your rankings. When the challenge changed up, I had to wait a couple of hours before the results were accumulated. I was very nervous about achieving a better time in Speedrun or Survival mode because I might not have been able to replicate it again in Championship and it wouldn’t reflect my time. I wouldn’t mind if it became your personal best in Speedrun mode as well as becoming your best time in Championship mode.

It also means that there are no leaderboards to compare yourself with other people- which shocks me that that is an omission. There are leaderboards for World Championship mode, but not for every challenge. I have definitely heard other reviewers say that this is an issue for them as well.

• Party Mode

This is the Offline Multiplayer mode. You play with a bunch of people and can either choose to do individual challenges where you can do whatever you want, or choose from a selection of pre determined party packs, these include things like First Time Speedrunners, beating some Boss Fights from Super Mario Brothers, in fact we did an entire challenge based off Boss Fights, including a few of the Legend Challenges in a row.

Party Mode does give you an estimate on how long each of the packs’ multiplayer sessions are going to go, and for newcomers it does allow a practice go before you try the real thing- annoyingly, it is there by default so we played it a few times without wanting to. I played this with my colleagues Reece, Elliot, and Ren, and we were mixed on the experience. I think it takes the right group to do it, because I noticed none of us were really into NES nostalgia or micro challenges. We couldn’t really get into the multiplayer aspect that a game like Mario Party would give us.

But there was another big problem. The screen size they give you when playing with 4 players is WAY TOO SMALL. This happens in Survival Mode too, but in that you can change the screen size for yourself. That option isn’t here in this mode and I think they should have made the screens a lot bigger, since I was struggling to see what I was doing in many sections, and as a result, I was doing a lot worse that I would in another mode.

The screen size didn’t help, even with a big monitor in docked mode. I think if we were to play this thing in portable, it would have been impossible.

CONS

• LImited Single Player

If you’re not into World Championship Mode, I think Speedrun Mode won’t hold your attention too long. Once you get an S rank in about everything, there’s not much time you can shave off after a certain point. Without an Internet connection, this game has a very limited appeal.

• Some of the Games Haven’t Aged Well

This is a problem I noticed since nostalgia covers can really blind us. Not everything Nintendo brought out in that time period was a complete 10/10. Some of the games here are obvious classics and definitely deserve their place. Kirby’s Adventure and the Mario games with the expectation of some levels are really good.

But I noticed that some of these games haven’t aged as well. I won’t say too much against Metroid, since I did enjoy most of my time with the challenges, though the controls aren’t as great as I remembered, and it doesn’t help that the Gameboy Advance Remake just got put on Nintendo Switch Online and I just did a full playthrough of that.

Kid Icarus isn’t as good as people remember it- ti does have some good qualities, and I enjoyed some of the challenges, but it was also one that I’d only go back to if it turned up in World Championship or Survival Mode (which it did in the second week and was one of the hardest challenges to do).

The big offenders for me, were Ice Climbers for the terrible jumping physics, Balloon FIght, which controls appallingly still to this day (I’ve never understood why people enjoy it), but the prize for  ‘I Never Want to Do This Unless I’m Forced To’ goes to Excitebike. I never want to play the original anymore. I would have taken the original Punch Out over this. It made me feel as though Nintendo really should have got out their cheque book for some third party games like MegaMan 2 or Castlevania.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I’m glad I played this game for an extra week, because I feel like in the second week the lustre was starting to come off it. I felt that the games were addictive, and this was a good way to play these games. If you don’t enjoy playing these games on NSO, there are still some issues. I think SIngle Player has limited appeal, and you have to be with the right kind of people for multiplayer.

That being said, I did go back to play Survival and World Championship mode quite a bit! SO I do think that this was a good game, but only if you think this game will appeal to you. If you don’t think you’ll like it, it won’t surprise you.

I think on a personal level, I’d give it an 8/10, particularly because of my experience in the first week playing, but I’m going to lower my score for the general public.

I do want this to sell well, because I would like to see Nintendo do this for their other consoles.

FINAL SCORE: 7.5/10