Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition

Verdict

Celebrating the speedrunning community whilst breathing new life into classic titles, there’s a lot to like about Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition.

Introduction

Bringing one of the most prolific gaming tournaments of all time into your living room, Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition is a real treat.

I’ll admit, after hitting the credits on the fantastic Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD and knowing that the next big Nintendo Switch release would be Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition, I was sceptical. The idea of playing through very short bursts of NES titles to get the quickest time possible felt like a better fit for a mobile game.

It also didn’t help that I am part of the age bracket of gamers who were too young (or not yet born) when the NES was at its peak, instead finding more affinity with the following 16-bit generation. However, after getting absolutely hooked on NWC: NES Edition, I’m glad to say that my scepticism was misplaced.

Gameplay

• Over 150 challenges to complete
• Race against your best time
• Some games are more fun than others

For those who are unfamiliar, the original crux of the Nintendo World Championship (started in 1990 with two more iterations since) was to achieve the highest score possible across multiple games and within a specific time limit. While that concept works just fine for a live event, it wouldn’t translate all that well into a dedicated video game which is why it’s been revamped.

This time around, the scoreboard should be the last thing on your mind as NWC: NES Edition places all its emphasis on speed – trying to complete a challenge as quickly as possible. The whole game feels like an ode to the speedrunning community (which is bound to feel at home here), except instead of completing an entire game from start to finish, you’re tasked with bite-size, almost WarioWare-style tasks.

At the beginning of the game, these tasks are incredibly easy, amounting to no more than getting the sword in The Legend of Zelda or reaching the first door in Super Mario Bros 2. As you progress however, the difficulty increases as you’re expected to defeat bosses, complete stages and, in some cases, get to a game’s ending.

These final Legend challenges are a chance for you to take everything you’ve learned from the previous tasks and put that knowledge to good use. There is a handy digital booklet for each Legend challenges, giving essential tips on the routes you need to take, but it really comes down to what you’ve memorised. Knowing exactly when to time a specific jump or understand which enemies to avoid entirely – this is the information that can shave off valuable seconds (sometimes milliseconds) from your overall time, and it’s here that NWC: NES Edition had me hooked.

Being able to best your previous time offers such an adrenaline rush that it becomes genuinely difficult to put the game down, always thinking that if you keep at it, you can achieve your best run yet. What helps to keep the motivation going is that once you’ve completed a challenge, a recording of your best performance is taken which then plays side by side against your current attempt.

If you’d rather delve into the details then you can just watch that highlighted performance and even move it forwards or backwards frame by frame, so that you can analyse exactly where you can make the best jumps, slides, attacks and more, all in the effort of a speedier run. There’s also a little indicator at the bottom of the screen to show what buttons are being pressed at any given moment.

There’s also a grading system that rates the performance of each try, which in turn gives you an idea of how far away you are from achieving greatness. For instance, if you come out of  a challenge with an A+ ranking, that might sound good but that means you’ve missed out on A++ and the highest ranking, S tier.

Because this is the ‘NES Edition’ of the NWC (which implies that we might see future console versions of this game down the line), the game revolves entirely around titles from the original Nintendo Entertainment System. 13 games have been selected here, ranging from Donkey Kong to The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros and Kirby’s Adventure.

There’s a good amount of variety in the playstyles of each title that it takes a fair amount of time to understand the nuances of each one, particularly in how they control. Kirby’s Adventure for instance is a far more floaty experience than any of the Mario titles included. However, I don’t think that all of these titles have aged particularly well, which makes some of them a drab to play.

Ice Climber is the worst example wherein, even now, I still can’t quite wrap my head around its jumping system and how your characters decides whether or not to land on a platform completely on a whim. Meanwhile the hit detection in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link feels very unforgiving at times and requires a great deal of focus.

To make sure that you don’t go off the intended path, the game will rewind your playthrough by a few seconds if you’re going the wrong way. This can be handy in stopping you from accidentally wasting time on the wrong path, particularly during longer challenges, but I did notice an instance where these older games haven’t been optimised accordingly to accommodate this feature.

During the Legend mission for Super Mario Bros, I needed to hit a hidden block that would unearth a beanstalk that I could climb. The problem was that SMB’s levels don’t allow you to go backwards, which became an immediate problem when I had gone just slightly too far, making it impossible to reach said beanstalk. Any attempt to push on would simply rewind the game and put me back into the midst of that conundrum, forcing me to eventually reset the challenge completely.

It remains to be seen whether or not issues like this can be fixed via an update, but it is worth mentioning as I can imagine them being the absolute bugbear for any speedrunners looking to achieve the perfect run.

As a final note on gameplay, it feels a bit odd that the game doesn’t allow you to just play all 13 titles in their entirety. Not only would it complement the game’s style as a celebration of these titles, but it would further help to understand their mechanics, learning their intracises without an ever present timer looming.

There are unlockable pins that you can collect throughout your playthrough, but other than being displayed as part of your online profile, they don’t really serve much of a purpose.

Performance

• The game features next to no loading screens
• No slowdown when resetting challenges
• Some titles have retained their original glitches and framerate issues

Given that the NWC: NES Edition experience is comprised of games that are decades old, it would be quite a disaster if the overall performance wasn’t up to par and yet, for better or worse, the game manages to recreate the feeling of those original titles almost verbatim.

What I mean by this is that titles like Super Mario Bros 3 and Excitebike, which ran incredibly well on their home console are still up to scratch today on a technical level. Kirby’s Adventure on the other hand, which is still fun to play, was absolutely riddled with slowdown, particularly when things get too hectic on screen, and that experience is still present on NWC: NES Edition.

I can understand to a degree wanting to recapture the feeling of these games so that existing speedrunners know what they’re getting themselves into, but I feel that it drags the overall presentation down somewhat, which is a shame given just how polished the game feels elsewhere.

I don’t recall another Switch title that boots up quite as quickly as NWC: NES Edition, which almost makes it even better for portable play as you can dive straight into a quick 10-minute playthrough without having to wade through menus and loading screens.

I also never experienced any slowdown when resetting the different challenges to give them another go. A brief press of the shoulder buttons will take you right back to the start without delay, which only makes the gameplay loop feel more inviting.

Multiplayer

• Two online modes: World Championship and Survival Mode
• Play offline with up to eight people
• Online tournaments should give the game plenty of longevity

While there’s a good amount of content to keep you occupied in the game’s single-player, it’s in the multiplayer modes where NWC: NES Edition is likely to keep players coming back for more.

On the online side of things, you have two modes to choose from: World Championships and Survival Mode. The former is a little more relaxed in that it gives you several days to complete five random challenges to the best of your ability. You can replay these challenges as much as you want within the allotted time, but it’s an opportunity to see if you really have what it takes to become a world champion.

Survival mode on the other hand is a bit more hectic, as you’re initially paired with seven other players, where you have to play through three different challenges, death-match style, in an ever revolving order. This mode of play means that the player count goes from eight to four, and finally to two for the third round. It’s an absolute blast and you can dive straight back into another session quickly, so it’s very tempting to keep on showing off your skills.

If you’d rather make things a bit more old-school and have a tournament at home with your friends then you can do exactly that in Party Mode. This offline bonanza can involve up to eight players as you tackle either one challenge at a time or, opt for a Challenge Pack that includes several.

I was quite impressed by just how many Challenge Packs are available, and while they’re separated by levels of difficulty, they also come with an estimated completion time to give you an idea of the commitment you’ll need to make to reach the end.

All of it amounts to quite an impressive amount of multiplayer options, and whether you’re planning or playing with friends or fellow speedrunners online, the budget price of NWC: NES Edition makes it feel like an essential addition to any Switch library.

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