Esports has become a ridiculously big business, sucking up so many dollars that could have gone into interesting, artful games instead. They’re holding an Olympic Esports Games now… and stupidly the IOC chose the authoritarian, puritanical hellnation, Saudi Arabia, for it. Hey, IOC, put Dead or Alive on the competition list. Do us all a favour and really make those prudes blush. Anyhow. The point I’m getting at with this intro is that while “professional gamer” is a legitimate career path now, there has always been video game competitions. One of the biggest ones in the “pre-esports” era was the Nintendo World Championships in 1990, which benefitted from its relationship with the 1989 movie-long advertisement, The Wizard. Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition has been conceived as nostalgia for those simpler times, where we could just celebrate pixels in all their pixel glory.
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a package of speed-running challenges. It takes 13 classic NES games, ranging from Balloon Fight and Kid Icarus to Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong and The Legend of Zelda, and breaks them up into a series of small challenges. The very easiest of these challenges are things like “suck in an enemy” in Kirby or “collect all the coins” in one of the Super Mario Bros. treasure pipes. These are over in just a few seconds.
As you unlock more the complexity slowly ramps up, until a final challenge does involve playing through a fair chunk of the game. The more complex the levels, the more room there is to improve your times, and that’s really what Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is focused on – “time trials” to try and shave fractions of a second off your best times.
The main single-player mode, Speedrun Mode, doesn’t even let you play in full-screen. Rather, you’re given two screens, side-by-side, with the one on the left being your play area, and the one on your right showing you a replay of your previous best time. It’s just like racing against ghost data in a time trial racing game, and just like in those games, it can get your hands sweating. I’m terrible at these things, because I’ll glance at the ghost, realise that I’m slightly ahead, and then instantly screw up somehow. As terrible as I am at them, they are enjoyable, albeit limited. There are only 156 of these stages, and while that sounds like a lot, you’ve got to remember that the vast majority of them are challenges that will take less than a minute to complete (if not 30 seconds).
In fairness, though, and as the name suggests, Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is not really designed to be a purely single-player experience. The real main mode is the World Championships mode, which challenges players to complete five different of these little stages consecutively, with the total time spent determining where you go on the leaderboard.
The genius here is that the collection of games are varied just enough that the experience is akin to competing in a Pentathlon in a real Olympic Games. You may well be a gun at Super Mario Bros., but unless you’ve spent a good chunk of time becoming at least reasonable at Balloon Fight as well, your uneven performance across the five events will cost you a really good overall score. The people who will be at the top of these leaderboards will spend an obscene amount of time training in the events that they’re less proficient at to become generalists, and I can see this becoming an enduringly popular competitive multiplayer game precisely because it tests so many different skills.
For people looking for something a bit more relaxed, there is a Party Mode for up to eight players in local multiplayer. I don’t see this being the same instant winner as, say, Mario Kart, Mario Party or Smash Bros for those beers-and-pizza nights, though, and that’s simply because these are NES games. As nostalgic as they are for some people, for many, many more they will likely be a touch too antiquated for their tastes. I can’t help but think that Nintendo may have been better served with a SNES take on this formula to draw in the younger players with gameplay that’s more relevant to how we play games today.
Finally, there is a “battle royale” mode too, with Survival Mode. In this mode players face off against ghosts of many players from all over the world. Each round ends with the bottom half of the players being cut, until the final round where the winner is decided. This is decent fun, but perhaps a bit redundant in a game that already has an excellent competitive mode and a fun casual option.
What is really disappointing is how little Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition has to offer outside of the minigames. When we’ve got incredible retro packages like the Atari 50 out there, the fact that this title, which trades so heavily on nostalgia, only offers badges to unlock (for clearing a stage with a high enough rating), is such a wasted opportunity. The very final stage for each of the 13 games offers some advice on the “golden route” for each game (i.e. the fastest pathway), and that is useful (and interesting as someone who has never followed speedrunning before), but where’s the digital library of concept art, or video interviews with top players of each of the various games, or footage from the actual Nintendo World Championships? There is so much that could have been done with this to make it a package to celebrate Nintendo’s long history in video game competition, and they did none of it.
Consequently, Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition feels like a release schedule filler. While the multiplayer features are robust, they’re hardly innovative, and really it’s just a package of sliced-up classic games with a timer attached to them. I’d never call a game development project “lazy,” because they’re not, but the minimum work has gone into this, and while it will become a competitive obsession for a small minority, there could have been so much more done to draw in a much broader audience and really celebrate the deep heritage of these games (as well as Nintendo in facilitating competitive play).
