Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition (Switch)

Since the early days of video games, there’s often been goals beyond just beating them and uncovering any secrets they may hold. High scores push you to master the game, but even with this metric, gamers found another way to test their skills in the form of speedruns. Beating a game as quickly as possible introduces a new reason to return to beloved classics, and old Nintendo games in particular are often great for speedrunning. They have years of knowledge that can be used to plan the best movement, they’re often well-designed and already beloved, and they usually have a degree of simplicity to their design so there aren’t too many variables to keep track of in any one moment. While many Nintendo fans can find the speedrunning community easily enough online, Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is an interesting release where Nintendo itself recognizes these aspects of its old games and builds an experience solely about trying to master speedy movement in those titles.

 

While Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition bears the name of a tournament series Nintendo has hosted a few times in the past, this Switch game is quite different in format and actually more about competing against your previous performances than trying to win against other humans. 13 games from the Nintendo Entertainment System are included here in miniature, the game carving out small sections to turn into challenges based solely on how quickly you can complete a specific goal. These can sometimes be incredibly small and quick tests of your movement ability, such as the player needing to grab a Mushroom in Super Mario Bros., an action that really only takes 2 or 3 seconds. At other points though, you might find yourself asked to complete a boss fight from a game that can sometimes be a lengthier affair, and as you get deeper into a specific game’s list of challenges, you’ll often go from actions that barely require much work to something a bit complicated like clearing an entire level.

Most of the games featured in Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition are 2D side-scrolling platformers which is fairly reasonable. Not only are most beloved NES games platformers, but when you’re mostly focusing on running and jumping in such games, it’s much easier to ask a player to hone their movement through repeated attempts. Figuring out just when to jump to slip past danger or avoid something that will slow you down gives you that speedrunner experience without a lot of the complexity that comes from the actual hobby, especially since there are no glitches being focused on and it is primarily a test of tightening up your performance of regular actions. However, a few things can hobble your efforts to get better at the games offered in the collection, the first of which is there not being much room to train outside of the challenges. When you’re running forward with a singular simple goal, the space you have to learn the game’s specific movement style is quite limited, and NES platformers can vary wildly in how smooth they are. Ice Climber for example has very rigid jumping that can take some time to grapple with, the space adventure Metroid uses a lot more active enemies to guard landing spots, and even similar games have distinct differences since Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, Super Mario Bros. 2, and Super Mario Bros. 3 are all featured but have physics and mechanics that aren’t universal between the four.

 

With these speedrun challenges presented in such bite-sized chunks, it can be a little rough at first to get a grip on the game’s specific mechanics. While the game will do helpful things like circle areas of interest or show a few buttons on screen to explain them, it actually withholds more detailed information that can help you perform challenges better. Excitebike has a pretty flagrant case where someone unfamiliar with the game might be confused, the driving game simply telling you to press B to Turbo or A to Accelerate. This isolated information makes it sound like Turbo is used for occasional speed boosts when in reality it’s just a faster way to drive with the drawback that your engine will overheat if you do it too much, but the only real instructions crop up when you’re attempting the game’s hardest Legend challenges. Each game has a Legend challenge that usually comprises of beating a longer section of an NES title as fast as you can, but in a cute touch, you’ll be able to look through a little speedrunning strategy guide before starting it that evokes the kind of tips and tricks you’d find in an old magazine like Nintendo Power. It feels like something similar could have been used for an appealing introductory lesson for each game, but at least most of the featured titles are either somewhat intuitive or focused in on small enough parts you won’t have to worry about the deeper considerations involved in how an adventure game like The Legend of Zelda would normally be played.

 

With well over 100 challenges in total, you will find a somewhat hearty but not as expansive of a selection as could have been provided. While you get to tackle every boss in Super Mario Bros. 3 as a speedrun, a game like Kirby’s Adventure or Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link only provided specific ones. On one hand it is understandable the game didn’t want to carve out every possible section as a challenge, and Zelda 2 not only makes some smart selections on who to feature, but since every challenge starts with a little video to give you an idea how to play, it can actually overcome some of its rougher combat mechanics by showing you how to get in some clean and easy hits. At the same time, bite-sized challenges are a bit of a double-edged sword because the challenges can often be a bit straightforward. They are incredibly easy to repeat over and over, challenges that only take a few seconds easy to whittle down your record on. Realizing the little places you can improve and sharpening your skills in miniature can be addicting at times provided the task isn’t so basic there’s little room for improvement, but a rating system does encourage you to get better. You’ll be provided a letter grade on how swiftly you finished the challenge, there not only being expected letters like A, B, and C but also things like B+, A++, and even an S to help you realize when you’re getting closer to the next letter barrier or achieved near perfection. Weirdly there’s no way to compare your scores online within the game and even stranger, the game hides that L+R will cause a helpful immediate reset.

Refining your skills can be an exciting self-imposed challenge without the pressure of competing on leaderboards so the information staying local may make some sense, but with some of the speedruns being so basic, there’s also not much reason to return to them after you’ve achieved whatever rating you’re content with. You do earn coins any time you finish a challenge, earning more based on performance and the difficulty of the speedrun, and these are at first used for unlocking additional challenges. This can make it so you essentially have to try every game on offer, running up against frustrations with how Kid Icarus, Donkey Kong, and Ice Climber almost unavoidable if you want to unlock the final challenges in an unrelated game like Balloon Fight. Coins can also be spent elsewhere though on your online profile, since while you can’t compare speedruns directly, there are online tournaments held regularly. While you don’t actively compete live with others, you’ll be thrown together with a few other players who had their gameplay previously recorded when they attempted the tournament. There is a general highest score format for each of the challenges selected for that tournament’s time period but also a more active contest where you perform multiple challenges back to back, players getting eliminated until only one is left at the end. This is where things like the pins and character icons you can buy show up, but you can mostly save your coins for useful things since there’s not much to this multiplayer component besides trying to perform well on the spot without resets to cushion your errors. You can do offline multiplayer competitions as well which uses a system without elimination, players instead receiving points based on how well they did in each speedrun comparatively, a fairly reasonable format for testing performance consistency against friends.

 

For the most part, playing through the challenges will have its high and lows based on what parts of a game is being featured and how well it suits the speedrun refinement format. The game’s efforts to cordon off a challenge can lead to little quirks like the game automatically rewinding you a bit if you go off the beaten path into an area that won’t help you, but the rewind will keep the clock running so you only lose time if this occurs. Rewinding is also done if you should die during a speedrun, this letting you keep going technically even though a high scoring run obviously won’t have any deaths. It’s definitely a useful feature for challenges that expect you to tackle a long section of a game, but the rewind is also a bit basic, setting you back a few seconds without accounting for where it gives you back control. You can find yourself suddenly over a pit or just about to run into a monster, causing another death and rewind since you couldn’t react in time, something that seems fairly common if you’re attempting a later level in a Super Mario Bros. game. It does feel like a case where you should just do a full reset if you’re having such issues, but it can be annoying in the Legend challenges where the game is causing you to lose more time than you should have because it can’t rewind you to a truly safe point. It should also be noted the included versions of the NES games are loyal even where it hurts, games like Kirby’s Adventure keeping moments of slowdown that can lead to those precise button presses to beat a hard time being thrown off by the game chugging in an accurate but still bothersome way.

THE VERDICT: Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition turns Nintendo classics into bite-sized speed challenges that can be exciting to hone your skills in until you see that S rating, but some parts of the format will get in your way. Little room to practice because of the cordoned off sections and heavy speed focus make it tougher to get to grips with some of the weaker NES games and their rough controls, but the simplicity of many of the featured games also makes them perfect for shaving seconds off of in quick little tests you can repeat rapidly. Refining your play to beat your old times works well enough in the game’s better challenges and you can brush aside the uninteresting ones after plundering their coins, but much of the game is just a speedrunning novelty rather than something cohesive or as true a test as actually speedrunning the game featured in full.

 

And so, I give Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition for Nintendo Switch…

An OKAY rating. Nintendo games are sometimes billed as an excellent way to enter a specific game genre, providing both entertainment and approachable elements so it doesn’t overwhelm a novice player. It feels like, in some way, that Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is essentially Nintendo trying to do something similar but with the idea of speedrunning in general. The game not only condenses the actions required down into very small sections for the player to refine their skills in miniature instead of tackling huge complicated full-game quests, but it uses familiar sections from beloved games to present this format to a player who might be unfamiliar with the idea. It certainly could have done better, Nintendo perhaps thinking people would check out the NES games first on Nintendo Switch Online before popping over to play their small segments featured here, but a proper introduction to each would have done a lot to ease players into less familiar games or give them the necessary information that was otherwise kept for those delightful strategy guide segments that would have been lovely to see more of. Part of this collection was always going to suffer a bit by including games like Ice Climber that aren’t very smooth or even that interesting in terms of what you’re asked to do, and while there are a good deal of challenges, it also feels strange the game didn’t find more sections from each NES game to divide into speed challenges to make this a fuller package. It was thankfully not too sloppy in what it did choose, even trying to put some barriers into place to keep a player from being bogged down by things like the inventory in The Legend of Zelda that would slow play if it was required, but it also has sections like playing through an entire dungeon in Kid Icarus where you run into more elements that aren’t consistent like enemy movement that can hamper the appeal of repeating a challenge until your skill earns a win instead of elements like luck.

 

An actual speedrunner might find Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition a good bit of fun since it allows them to compete in parts of games they’re familiar with beyond just clearing the full game or individual levels, and NES fans will likely appreciate how some challenges here show off some of the more intelligent elements of design in these old game like how some levels in Super Mario Bros. 3 can be cleared in one clean and fluid run forward if you time your jumps right. At the same time, it can feel like this game is just putting up walls so you only get little bits of games that are better experienced in totality or even perhaps better skipped instead. The concept feels like it was doomed to be a bit hit or miss by using old Nintendo developed games as its source material but also might not work as well once more advanced games are considered for it, but Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition does still have moments that might pull you in as you know you can shave a few seconds off a challenge that make it so this idea can be fun to explore a bit. Perhaps it would have been more interesting as a secondary feature in the Nintendo Classics apps on Switch, but this video game at least can spark some speedrunning thrills from time to time that may make it worth checking out for people who want to experience that playstyle in an approachable way.