The Nintendo Entertainment System is a true industry icon, but has a somewhat more diminished role in the memories of many British gamers. Unlike in the US and Japan where it reigned supreme, the NES was less ubiquitous over here, and I personally found myself more immersed in the Amiga and Atari wars, before Mario-mania took over with the Super Nintendo. I did have a mate with a NES and so had some time with the little grey box, but not enough for it to be deeply embedded in my childhood memories. However, Nintendo’s focus on legacy franchises and rereleasing its most famous titles has resulted in a kind of second hand nostalgia.
Inspired by the occasional real world championships, Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition brings a competitive tilt to retro NES gaming on the Switch as you are challenged to take on bite-sized sections of the console’s most famous titles and complete them in the fastest possible time. With a sizeable line-up of games and dozens of individual missions across each, this is a veritable playable museum of Nintendo’s first console.
Booting up Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition brings you to a menu offering solo and local multiplayer modes. The former contains three main game modes – Speedrun, World Championships, and Survival. The latter two here require a Nintendo Switch Online membership, and with servers only opening at the start of the week, the bulk of my time with the game has therefore been spent on the Speedrun mode. There are 169 micro challenges here to challenge and master, serving as training for the online sections as well as being compulsive in their own right. These challenges are spread across 13 games but not equally as some have over 20, whilst poor Ice Climbers and Excite Bike only have 6 each.
The lineup includes most of the system’s iconic titles, but the lack of games by Capcom and Konami is a missed opportunity. Instead we have Nintendo’s first party range fully represented with four Marios, both Zeldas, Metroid, Kirby, Kid Icarus, Donkey Kong, Balloon Fight and the aforementioned Ice Climbers and Excite Bike. Throughout each set of challenges, you’ll be taking on timed boss fights, tricky platforming sections or even micro tasks befitting a WarioWare game, like collecting the first mushroom in Super Mario Bros in the quickest time possible. The thrill and addictiveness comes from refining your technique to shave off milliseconds each time and aim for the coveted S ranking.
After unlocking all of an individual game’s challenges, your final obstacle will be a more lengthy and involved Legend level. These vary depending on each game but include completing the whole first Mario game using the level skips and completing the first dungeon of Zelda. For anyone outside the Games Done Quick crew, the Legend challenges include a useful Classified Information page that looks like a guide straight out of an Official Nintendo Magazine. To further encourage replayability (if beating your own time was not enough) every task is ranked and an in-game pin is awarded if you get an A rank or higher. As I write this review I’ve successfully finished all the main challenges and am working on the Legend ones.
One aspect of the game I found a little unnecessary was the coin system. Finishing a challenge opens up the opportunity to purchase the next one for 100 coins (300 for the Legend ones), but while coins are plentiful to begin with there aren’t enough to unlock everything, even if you succeed each time, meaning some grinding is needed. With a handful of levels taking less than two seconds to complete, this grinding isn’t hugely time consuming but it takes away from the feeling of progress.
Online modes are where you’ll be testing your skills against players around the world. First up in Survival you’ll be taking on ghost data uploaded by other players in a series of three challenges randomly picked from the full range. The first round sees eight players whittled down to four and then a final head-to-head for victory. These are fun and there are silver and gold divisions to offer varying levels challenge. If nothing else, seeing how the very best scores are obtained is useful training for your own skills even in defeat. That being said, the default view has eight individual screens showing all your competitors and that is very difficult to focus on when playing on handheld.
World Championship mode contains 5 missions and you can continuously repeat these with only your best time being recorded. New Championships take place every week but there is no indication of how well you are doing until the results come in. This means that there is a nagging compulsion to go back and try and get the time down a little bit more, but doesn’t have the same effect as a traditional high score table.
The other nagging feeling, though, is that it’s a bit rich to demand a Nintendo Switch Online subscription to play these modes. There’s no direct online head-to-head competition, so you’re always just playing against ghost data in glorified leaderboards. Locking fairly minimal online features behind a subscription is pretty cheeky.
Finally there is a local multiplayer mode that allows for up to eight players to take on levels competitively. Obviously I’d recommend only doing this hooked up to a TV as visibility becomes an issue with more than two players. This mode really brings back the glory days of playing with/against my brother and triggered waves of nostalgia, even if the actual games were different from my own experience. My kids enjoyed the micro challenges and I’m hopeful that this will be a gateway into them trying some of the full original games too.
