Between WarioWare, NES Remix, and Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition, Nintendo has a thing for chopping its games up. Small chunks, often. When it comes to Nintendo World Championships, the clunky name is by far the longest part. As for the rest of the game, it’s, what, 10 seconds, 50 seconds at a push? This is Nintendo doing TikTok, Nintendo in the editing suite. And it’s fascinating.
Nintendo World Championship is all about speedrunning. The game takes 13 old Nintendo classics and chops them up to form around 150 one-shot challenges. For example, Super Mario Bros has a challenge to get a mushroom, a challenge to collect all the coins in an underground section, a challenge to beat 1-1 as fast as possible. Ice Climber has challenges to reach certain floors. The original Legend of Zelda has challenges to enter that cave and get the sword and challenges to defeat enemies as fast as possible. Metroid…
Two things are clear. First, I find the shorter challenges by far the best. Maybe it’s because I’ve been playing WarioWare for so many years, but when Nintendo World Championship gives you something to do for 30 seconds – say, a jump challenge through a Metroid corridor – my attention starts to wander. It’s not that I can’t work on one thing for 30 seconds – my attention span hasn’t diminished that much – it’s more that the game prepares me for very fast-paced things, so when I’m asked to do reasonably quick things, everything drags.
Secondly, there aren’t many outfits with a back catalogue as well-suited to this as Nintendo. With games coming exclusively from the 8-bit era, Nintendo World Championship lives in a world of playful immediacy. When you see a Mario screen, you know what to do. Same goes for Zelda, Metroid, ExciteBike. You can see the whole world, not just a first-person slice of it. You don’t have to worry about camera controls or twin sticks. Gosh, my life used to be simple. Sure, Sony could do something like that – ten seconds to break someone’s ankle with a hammer in The Last of Us, GO! – and it would be fascinating, but there would be a cognitive chug at the start that’s completely missing from NES games.
As I type this, I wonder if I have it completely right. These games seem more direct to me, but I am extremely old now. Would they be as direct to my ten-year-old, or would the cognitive jog just occur because her games don’t look that way anymore? I would ask, but it’s her last week of school and she’s in rehearsal for the play. Another time!
Nintendo World Championship I think has four main elements. There’s the single player mode where you just play through the challenges and try to get good times. Then there’s a mode where you set times in specific challenges and wait to see how you stack up against the rest of the world when the results are announced. Then there’s a mode where you’re put into a series of challenges where you race against other players’ ghost data and try not to get eliminated. Then there’s the party mode.
It’s probably filler, coming at the end of a console’s lifespan, but it’s hard to get too grumpy about it when it’s so beautifully packaged, like an 80s American game show that aired in the middle of the night on a Friday in the 90s, and so quirky. And it’s funny, the idea of Sony or Microsoft doing the same. I’d love to see that, but what I’d really like to see is some kind of indie games all-stars tackling this. Make a river in Dorfromantik! Kill a shopkeeper in Spelunky! Go on! Out! Faster and faster!