Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition Review – Nostalgic Speedrunning

It was pretty exciting to hear Nintendo was bringing the World Championship series to Switch. As a bonafide 90s kid, the memories of the 1990 Nintendo competition exist in my mind in a rosy glow of nostalgia.

Every NES gamer wished they could be a part of the first-ever Nintendo World Championship. It was a huge deal. So this new game should satisfy every 90s kid who never had the chance to sign up for the original championship, right? well, not totally… but we will get into that. First let’s explore what Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition has to offer.

The basic premise of the Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition is competition. Compete against yourself, compete against family and friends, and compete against players all around the globe. Your goal is to beat every high score (including your personal best) to come out on top.

There are 150 mini-game challenges taken from 13 different classic 8-bit NES games: Super Mario Bros, Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Kid Icarus, Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros. 2, Excitebike, Ice Climber, Balloon Fight, Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels, The Adventure of Link, Super Mario Bros. 3, and Kirby’s Adventure. These challenges range from a very simple ‘Normal’ difficulty to a super tough ‘Legend’ difficulty. Win a round, earn coins, and then use them to unlock the next challenge. Pretty straightforward stuff.

You can choose to play solo or in a local party of between two and eight players. Solo mode gives you a few options for gameplay: Speedrun Mode, World Championships, and Survival Mode. Speedrun is great practice for when you want to go up against other players as it has the full range of 150 mini-game challenges from all 13 games.

Once you are familiar with the challenges, it is worth jumping into either Survival Mode or the World Championships. For me, this is where the real fun begins. Beating your own personal best is fine, but there is nothing better than competing against other players!

The Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition really comes into its own with the championship mode. All players take on five challenges each week across a range of difficulties to see who will come out on top. The best time wins!

You can retry each one as many times as you can in an attempt to reach S Rank in the speediest possible time. You find out the winner at the end of the week and a new championship starts the next day.

Survival Mode pits you against ghost-times of players just like you. You choose either Silver or Gold division and take on three rounds of challenges alongside the ghosts of seven other players.

I found this mode trickier than the others as you have to get at least fourth place to get to the next round. Not an easy task if the first round is not a game you are particularly good at. For me, Metroid will always be my downfall. I was awful at it in the 90s and apparently still struggle with it today! Survival is fun if you love a challenge. The ghost times are completely random, so the players can be a mix of high-level and regular players.

I made my way through the list of 13 games and then tried each of the higher-difficulty solo challenges once to get a feel for what each offered. Subsequently, it didn’t take me long to finish each one of the mini-challenges. As much as I loved the trip down nostalgia lane, the playable snippet isn’t enough to satisfy. In fact, it just made me wish Nintendo would re-release some of the old classics in full. Playing local games against friends was good competitive fun, but it still felt like something was lacking. It just wasn’t quite enough for me.

Now, let’s move on to my main bugbear with this game. This is supposed to be based on, or at least inspired by, the 1990 Nintendo World Championships. It is referenced in the Nintendo Online info for the game, and it’s heavily featured in the promotional video. So, if this is meant to be some kind of homage to the championships, why aren’t the same games included?

In the original Nintendo World Championship, players battled it out by playing Super Mario Bros, Red Racer and Tetris. Only one of those classic titles is available on the Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition game. It seems like a bit of a tease to offer players the Nintendo World Championship but not include two of the original titles.

The Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition offers a range of platformers but not much in the way of puzzles and racers. It doesn’t have a fair range of game styles to represent the NES, in my opinion. I mean, did we really need three Super Mario Bros games? At least one of those could have been swapped out for Red Racer or Tetris.

To sum up, I do find Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition to be a fun distraction and a half-decent party game. Local multiplayer is obviously more exciting than playing alone but joining the weekly championships is fun too. The weekly challenges are engaging, as is the Survival Mode. I just wish it included Red Racer too, or at the very least Tetris. If the game entices you purely for the NES nostalgia then you’re golden, but if you are looking for a recreation of the 1990 championships then this isn’t the title for you.