Remember NES Remix on Wii U? We loved watching it back in the day, and now Nintendo has seen fit to revisit similar territory with Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, a game that aims to put you in the shoes of a Nintendo World Championships competitor!
Okay, maybe we’re forcing the excitement a little here, it’s actually pretty hard to get too excited about yet another compilation of little challenges snipped from old 8-bit games we’ve shot through enough times before, but hey, here we are, and guess what? We’re actually enjoying ourselves a lot more than we thought we would.
Yes, this collection of 13 Nintendo classics is broken down into small playable challenges, and includes the likes of Super Mario Bros 1-3, Kirby’s Adventure, Excitebike (always this writer’s favorite), Ice Climber, Kid Icarus, and of course Zelda and Metroid. At first glance, it’s all very NES Remix. However, there’s actually a lot here fewer in terms of the diversity of objectives and the ways in which challenges are addressed.
At its core, and as we explained in our extensive hands-on preview, this game is all about speed. Racing through objectives as quickly as possible. You get points based on your finish time and win by being the fastest, and the challenges range from Easy to Master difficulty. Simple. If that kind of thing stresses you out, well, prepare to be stressed, we guess.
We spent a good chunk of our time in the offline Speedrun mode before the game’s servers came to life on launch week, and it’s essentially a training ground where you can replay each challenge as many times as you like. Grab your first Super Mushroom, zoom through a section of the level and grab the pole, bust some Octoroks, pull off some awesome jumps… whatever the current challenge – and there are 150 to attempt – it’s good old-fashioned speed that comes first.
There’s no doubt about it, it feels like a bit of a downgrade at first and, as mentioned in our preview, the old games here don’t get any nips, tucks or tweaks like they did for NES Remix. However, with the lowered price tag and now that we’ve spent some time in the core online modes (World Championships and Survival), our opinions have gone from extremely bemused to actually having a decently good time, thank you very much.
Why? Well, once you get into the groove, once you start competing, Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition shifts through the gears and becomes something we can see ourselves diving into again and again for the revamped challenges that make up the game’s two main modes. World Championship rotates through five challenges every week, giving you a number of Normal, Hard, and Master challenges to try out. Your times then show up on leaderboards, with overall rankings and rankings based on your birth year.
Survival mode, the best of the bunch, gives you two leagues, Silver and Gold, to try out, where you complete three challenges against other players’ ghost times and try to finish on top to avoid elimination over three rounds. Again, it’s all very simple, but the slickness and immediacy of the online aspects make for something that’s hard to put down once you get into that mindset of shaving more and more seconds, or milliseconds if you’re being serious, off your performance. It gets mesmerizing, and that’s all we can really ask for. It’s also the kind of thing that’s going to get massively more competitive as players get involved, and we’re now looking forward to the floodgates opening so we can beat you all. Yep, that’s an immediate challenge.
Of course, there’s also a party mode for local co-op that supports up to eight people, and speed is again the name of the game, this time with the same challenges being tackled but in themed packs and the like. We’re not going to sit here and say this is an ultra-generous package – it really isn’t – and each mode is more of the same in a different way. It looks fine, the menus are super-responsive, online works as expected and it all works perfectly well in handheld, but these are still bite-sized samples of some very old games, without much tweaking or surprises. In that regard, more effort could certainly have been put into them.
What finally pushed us into more positive territory was the joy of watching younger players try out NES games for the first time. If you have kids or are playing with young gamers or beginners, it’s really great to see them try to come to terms with how slow and fiddly these old beauties are. It’s also a really fun way to introduce people to some absolute all-timers through this short history of highlights. Once you’ve mastered all these challenges and cracked open the global leaderboards, you’ll know all there is to know about the game feel of some very important markers in the path of video game history.
No longer do you have to wonder what it feels like to fall down a long, vertical corridor in Metroid after carefully working your way to the top (spoiler: it feels bad). And isn’t that worth the price of admission, not to mention all the weekly challenges and trophies?
Finally, we’re also really into the collecting and customizing stuff here. Nintendo knows we’re all huge freaks for this sort of thing, the profile icons and name tags celebrate various achievements, and they’ve thrown in a bunch of collectibles to suck up from each of the 13 games available via coins earned through playing. No paying extras, no messing around, just play the game, get good and earn some coins. The good stuff.
So, for $25, it’s a pretty straightforward deal. There are no surprises or improvements, just a bunch of cold-blooded classic Nintendo games cut into iconic sections that you can race through and then replay until you’ve squeezed every last nanosecond out of the thing. A solid night-in game? We think so, although it could have done better with a little more effort to surprise us all.
Conclusion
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition doesn’t make a great first impression. It’s in many ways a downgrade from NES Remix, and there’s not as much variety or effort put into the challenges, nor any graphical tweaks to speak of this time around. But persevere, get competitive and start collecting all the pins, icons and top-ranking times on offer, and you’ll find yourself thoroughly entertained. It’s a small thing, focused purely on speed, but we expect it to appeal to plenty of people looking for a competitive outlet to show off their old-school skills. And hey, it also doubles as a handy history of some iconic Nintendo gaming moments and mechanics.