Review: Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition (Switch) -Focused And Slight, But Addictive

Remember NES Remix on the Wii U? We enjoyed it for what it was back in the day, and now Nintendo has seen fit to return to similar grounds with Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, a game that aims to put you in the shoes of a competitor at the Nintendo World Championships!

Ok, so maybe we’re forcing the excitement just a little here, it’s actually fairly hard to get too worked up about another compilation of bite-sized challenges clipped from ancient 8-bit games that we’ve already blasted through plenty of times before, but hey, here we are, and y’know what? We’re actually enjoying ourselves way more than we thought we might.

Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)
Yes, this collection of 13 Nintendo classics is broken down into small playable challenges, and it features the likes of Super Mario Bros 1-3, Kirby’s Adventure, Excitebike (always this writer’s favourite), Ice Climber, Kid Icarus, and, of course, Zelda and Metroid also make the cut. On the face of things it’s all very NES Remix. However, here there’s actually much less in terms of variety with regards to the objectives and ways in which challenges are meted out.

In essence, and as we’ve already detailed in our extensive hands-on preview, this game is all about speed. Speeding your way through objectives as fast as you possibly can. You get scored on your final time and win by being the quickest, and challenges scale from Easy to Master difficulty. Simple. If that sort of thing stresses you out, well, prepare to be stressed, we guess.

We spent a big old chunk of time in the offline Speedrun mode before the game’s servers came alive in launch week, and this is essentially a practice ground where you can run every challenge over and over as much as you want. Grabbing your first Super Mushroom, zipping through a section of a level and grabbing the pole, smashing some Octoroks, putting in some sweet jumps…no matter what the current challenge — and there are 150 to try — it’s good old-fashioned speed that comes first.

Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)
There’s no doubt about it, it feels like a downgrade initially and, as mentioned in our preview, the old games here haven’t had any nips or tucks or tweaks visually like they did for NES Remix. However, with the reduced price tag involved, and having now spent some time in the main online modes (World Championships and Survival), our opinions have gone from nonplussed in the extreme to actually having quite a good time, thank you very much.

Why? Well, once you get into the groove, once you start competing, Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition switches through the gears and becomes something we can see ourselves continuing to dip into for the refreshed challenges that make up the game’s two main modes. World Championship switches up its five challenges on a weekly basis, giving you a bunch of Normal, Hard, and Master challenges to try out. Your times then go on leaderboards, with overall rankings and ranking by your birth year.

Survival mode, the pick of the bunch, gives you two leagues, Silver and Gold, to try out, smashing through three challenges against other players’ ghost times and attempting to come in the top runners to avoid elimination over three rounds. Again, all very simple, but the slickness and immediacy of the online aspects makes for something that’s hard to put down once you get in that mindset of shaving more and more seconds, or milliseconds when it gets real, off your performances. It gets hypnotic, which is all we can really ask. It’s also the sort of thing that’s going to become wildly more competitive as players join in, and we’re now looking forward to the floodgates opening so we can batter you all. Yes, that is a direct challenge.

Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)
Of course, there’s also a party mode for local co-op that supports up to eight people, and speed is the watchword again, this time making your way through the same challenges but in themed packs and so on. We’re not gonna sit here and say this is some ultra-generous package — it’s really not — and each mode is more of the same cut a different way. It looks fine, the menus are super responsive, online works as expected, and it all performs perfectly in handheld, but it’s still just bite-sized samples of some very old games, without much in the way of touch-ups or surprises. More effort could certainly have been made in this respect.

What’s pushed us into more positive territory in the end, has been the fun of witnessing younger players trying NES games for the first time. If you have kids or are playing with young gamers or newbies, it’s a real blast watching them try to come to terms with how slow and tricky these old beauties are. It’s also a very nice way to shorthand educate folks on some absolute all-timers via this very quick history of highlights. Once you’ve mastered all of these challenges and bust open the global leaderboards, you’ll know everything there is to know about the gamefeel of some very important markers along the road of video game history.

Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)
You’ll no longer have to wonder how it feels to fall all the way down a long vertical corridor in Metroid after carefully plodding to the very top (spoiler: it feels annoying), and really, isn’t that worth the price of entry alone, never mind all your weekly challenges and trophies?

Finally, we also love the collecting and personalising aspect of things here. Nintendo knows we are all massive freaks for this stuff, the profile icons and name tags celebrating various achievements, and they’ve piled on a whole bunch of collectibles to hoover up from each of the 13 games available via coins earned through play. No paying for extras, no messing around, just playing the game, getting good, and earning some coins. The good stuff.

And so, in the end, for your 25 bucks, it’s a fairly simple deal. There are no surprises or enhancements, just a bunch of stone-cold classic Nintendo games cut into iconic sections for you to blaze through and then rinse and repeat until you’ve eked every last nanosecond out of the thing. A party night staple? We reckon so, even if it could have been better with just a little more effort to surprise us all.

Conclusion
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition doesn’t make a great first impression. It’s a downgrade in many ways to 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. However, stick with it, get into the competitive mindset, and start collecting up all the pins, icons, and top-ranked times on offer, and you may find yourself fully entertained. It’s a slight thing, purely speed-focused, but we expect that’ll suit plenty of folk who want a competitive outlet to display their old-school skills. And hey, it also doubles as a handy history of some iconic Nintendo gaming moments and mechanics.