REVIEW: Play Like It’s 1990 With Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition

The early 90s was a golden age for Nintendo. NES sales were through the roof, the Game Boy was selling like hotcakes, and their latest system was right around the corner. SEGA was just a blip on their radar, and Atari’s fall from grace was far from over. Even their company name eventually replaced “video games” in parent’s vocabularies until the mid-2000s! Things were going so great that Nintendo decided to keep the hype train rolling and planned The Nintendo World Championships. The concept was grand, and kids, teenagers, and even some adults flocked to shopping malls to show off their skills and become a Nintendo World Champion. Sadly, this didn’t last long. Even when Nintendo tried to revive the championships in 2017, it wasn’t meant to be. Sure, they can’t get the hype of an actual tournament like the ones in the ’90s again, but they CAN release a game harkening back to those tournaments so everyone can play in them. At least to some degree.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is Nintendo’s newest entry in what I’m calling their “Nostalgia” line (more on that some other time). There are over 150 speedrunning challenges across 13 NES games and your goal is to complete them as fast as humanly possible. Turn on the internet services and your times get recorded and shared all over the world. There are 3 modes you can play: Speedrun is the offline mode where you can practice a challenge after unlocking it. World Championship has a set of 5 challenges where you can set your best time and hope it beats out other players. Survival also has a set of challenges for you to play in, but you’re racing against ghost data from other players.

On the surface, this game looks pretty bare-bones and uninteresting to a casual fan. To the Nintendo die-hards and video game historians (like myself), Nintendo did a great job bringing the classic Championship style of gameplay to the Switch. Each challenge ranges in difficulty from easy to legendary. One challenge has you going up the first ladder in Donkey Kong and another wants you to speedrun all of Super Mario Bros. in under 10 minutes. The variety and difficulty in challenges are there, and the game is beginner-friendly. Say you were to fall off a ledge or lose a power-up you needed, the game instantly rewinds a few seconds so you could try again. Yes, the timer keeps ticking, but you won’t lose a life and have to start all over again. Restarting a challenge is as easy as hitting the L and R buttons simultaneously, and going back to the menu can be achieved by hitting ZL and ZR.

So how does the “World Championship” fit into this? How it works is that for 1 week, players can play in a set of 5 challenges in World Championship mode. Competitors chase their best time and it gets submitted automatically. If you happen to beat your championship best time (in Championship mode), the new time gets submitted and your records are updated. Besides the time limit, there is no limit to how many times you can retry a challenge to improve your time. Once the allotted time for the championship is up, the results are released, and a new set of challenges is picked for competitors. You can’t see how other competitors are doing, which hurts and helps. You won’t be discouraged by seeing times vastly quicker than yours, but you won’t know how much you need to improve to get better.

When the Championship is done, you can see your results. The rankings go as how many people played, as well as those who played in the same year you were born. My best challenge in the first competition was going through 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. in under 22 seconds. I got an S ranking, but 362 people got better times than I did. However, I placed in the top 0.8% of players worldwide. The total number of competitors for that challenge came out to 50,637 and for those who were born in the year 1990, I placed 16 out of 1,748. It’s cool to see, but alas, you still can’t check the times of other players to see what times beat yours. You can also see in the screenshots below that I tied with so many others at the same time, so I can’t tell how many people I truly beat to get rank 363. Even if they don’t keep the records in a database, it would be nice for Nintendo to show people the scores of others who beat you just to practice incase the challenge gets picked again for the Championship.

Survival mode is the other competitive mode with different rules. There are 3 challenges (picked from the current Championship Mode pool) and 3 rounds in this 1v7 free-for-all. However, you aren’t playing against live players, but rather ghost data of their runs from previous attempts. In Survival mode, there is a rewind feature but no restart feature. This means you can “die” in a challenge and keep going, but you can’t restart the challenge, you either win, get knocked out, or give up. Survival mode also has 2 “divisions” (Silver and Gold) with shared and different challenges. The challenges played in the division are random, which can help or hinder you, depending on which challenge you’re stronger in. Like in Championship mode, the challenges refresh every week so you won’t be stuck with the same challenges.

It’s clear the devs at Nintendo put some love and care into this game to make it feel like the older Nintendo World Championship carts that were used in the old tournaments. I had the pleasure of playing the 1990 cart at a convention years ago and I was surprised by how the games worked in this competitive setting. I only knew of the championships through a book and them being mentioned across different mediums from time to time. Having the challenges there so you can practice them for Survival mode and be able to keep trying for your best score in Championship mode keeps me wanting to come back. Even if I did the best I could do in Championship mode and won both divisions in Survival, I still have some challenges to unlock and play in for Speedrun mode. Even though I would get frustrated with missing a jump or not getting the timing right on a run, the feeling of scoring an ‘S’ ranking on a challenge is addicting. Especially on the harder challenges.

The game isn’t without its problems, however. One of the biggest flaws of the game is the default screen size for the challenges in Speedrun and Survival mode. Speedrun mode has your personal best time to the right while the screen you’re currently playing is to the left. While I see why some gamers may like this as a way to see how they are progressing or getting better, I find it distracting. Especially when I mess up a jump and see the completion screen out of the corner of my eye. Survival mode is the most egregious with all the screens set to the same size. You can easily get lost in where your screen is if your eyes wander, but thankfully this can be changed in the settings. You can hide your personal best window entirely in Speedrun, and your screen does get larger for Survival – so if you need to sneak a peek at who to beat in Survival mode you still can. While playing, I kept switching between my Pro Controller and my Super Famicom controller to see if one was better than the other (I don’t own any wired controllers or the NES wireless ones). There were times when the Pro Controller D-pad would spazz out and go in the wrong direction, or not register at all. The Super Famicom controller worked great, but my hand started to cramp up while holding it certain ways to get quicker button inputs. Some folks online have been complaining about input lag with the wireless controllers, but as of now I have yet to experience a major issue (though there have been a few times I could’ve sworn I pushed the button in time to make a jump).

While I praise Nintendo for trying something like this, there are still things that Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition could have improved on. Not having lobbies or matchmaking is good for those who work late hours (like me) but it would be nice to play with live humans online. The Party Mode can hold up to 8 players, but they have to be in your living room and 8 controllers need to be connected to your Switch. Also, more people playing means the smaller the screens are going to be. No setting up a room online like in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Survival mode does help as I’m playing against players, but those players recorded their times who knows how long ago.

With the game just coming out, it’s hard to tell how long people will want to play this. Sure, you can keep practicing in Speedrun mode, but once you get an ‘A’ rank or higher you get your in-game pin and that’s it. There isn’t much to keep players coming back aside from different weekly challenges that you may or may not have played in Speedrun. Not to mention this game is all about the NES – and while there is a wide love for retro games, that’s still a niché fanbase within another niché fanbase. There is a funny line when you first boot up the game on how some of its players haven’t been born yet when Nintendo started the Championships, but those players may only play a few minutes and never touch it again.

If you’re interested in this game, then this is the warning I shall bestow upon you: the game is fun, challenging yourself with mastering these older games is fun, and the rush you get when you set a personal record is quite nice. However, this is made for players who like speed runs, those who like to get through games as quickly as possible and nail those pixel-perfect jumps. If that doesn’t interest you, and you aren’t the biggest fan of 8-bit/older Nintendo games, then you won’t have fun with this. I enjoy playing competitively with friends and family, and the fact that I can play against other people around the world from the comfort of my home is exciting. This game screams Nintendo history, and I’m having fun getting high scores and playing games I’ve never really played on the NES before, like Kid Icarus and Excitebike.

If you’re still interested, and think this could be a fun party game, then definitely get the digital version. It’s only $30, and if you happen to have a Nintendo eShop gift card lying around, then it’s a fine purchase. If you want to get the physical game, then you’ll either have to get the Deluxe Set or buy the game only from a reseller. Nintendo didn’t make a “Standard” physical copy, so it’s digital-only or shelling out some extra cash for a physical copy. The Deluxe Set does come with a replica cartridge, beautiful pins, and some postcards, but it’ll cost you $60. If you have a love for gaming history and neat little knick-knacks, then the Deluxe Set will be a great little treat for you. I currently have my replica cart displayed on my work desk.