Stefan Bradley
NINTENDO World Championships: NES Edition (NWC) is an intriguing, yet undercooked take on video game classics from about 40 years ago.
It presents over 150 speedrunning (finish as fast as possible) challenges that stem from 13 retro games from the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) console. In other words, these old games are the basis for quickfire mini-games.
The majority last less than 10 seconds, but some of the later ones take a few minutes. You complete these challenges to earn coins to unlock more difficult trials. The first one for Super Mario Bros (SMB) is to simply grab a Super Mushroom; the final SMB challenge sees the player speedrunning the entire game. As there’s different genres of games, the challenges for each title feels district. The motocross riding game Excitebike features vastly different trials to the combat-focused The Legend of Zelda games.
The shorter challenges are the most fun, and the gameplay loop of trying to beat your time for a better rank and to unlock more cosmetic rewards works well.
For younger gamers, there is appeal in NWC as a classic video game museum – you can try these titles out without having to commit a great deal of time. The presentation is very high quality, with beautiful-looking menus and an exciting background song.
As a showcase for the NES, a mere 13 titles seems inadequate – four of them are 2D Mario games. And not all of them I would classify as classics. Zelda II and the first Metroid haven’t aged particularly well, but in a bite-sized form it’s not so bad. Ice Climber doesn’t fare as well, with its terrible jump mechanics frustrating you every single second. The games are largely emulated in their original forms, so Kirby’s Adventure is still very laggy, which is annoying when speed is key. Balloon Fight is so one-note that the whole game might as well be a mini-game anyway. I’ve played Donkey Kong for many hours over the years, so I finished the challenges easily.
It’s a shame about the games left out – no Tetris, Castlevania, Mega-Man, Wrecking Crew, Donkey Kong Jr, Dr Mario, Battletoads or Punch-Out?
You need Nintendo’s online subscription to take part in the two other modes. One of which allows you to compete with seven other players’ times – although not in real-time; you’re competing with ‘ghost’ data. And the second one rotates a handful of challenges weekly, which are then compared to other players. That’s it for online functionality – there’s not even leader boards.
NWC in single-player is relatively short-lived, with not a ton of options available. The challenges are speedrun only – why is there nothing score-based, considering that gaming during that time period was all about the high score?
There is local multiplayer for up to eight players, and I think this works very well as a party game. If I had this as a kid, I’m sure my friends and I would have placed it in our multiplayer rotation.
The full version of these games are available with the online subscription ($30 annually), but not in this $50 game, which feels grubby. When I started gaming in the late 90s and early 2000s, these NES games were already very old to me. Why does Nintendo continue to showcase these NES classics, instead of its successors, the Super Nintendo and the Nintendo 64?
To sum this package up, I’d say ‘it’s nice, but is that it?’, because while it’s $30 cheaper than most full-price Nintendo Switch titles, the nostalgia magic wears off fairly quickly. Its long-term appeal is as a party game to take to your friend’s house or introduce Nintendo history to your family.
