God, Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is so frustrating. I’m this close to absolutely adoring this assortment of timed challenges from NES games. In many ways, it feels like it’s designed precisely for NES sickos like me, folks who have an enduring fondness not just for well-regarded classics like The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. but also for the rougher, more frustrating first-party games on Nintendo’s first console, like Ice Climber. But one huge, glaring flaw holds it back, relegating it to an interesting curiosity rather than the conversation- and competition-driving release it could have been.
Let me start with some of the things I really like about this game. First of all (and least importantly), I think the Deluxe Set Nintendo is selling is quite nice. It comes with a set of pins, postcards featuring the box art of all of the games featured in Championships, and a (strictly ornamental) gold NES cartridge. It’s all Nintendo paying tribute to itself, of course, but it’s a well-made assortment of goodies for a lot less than typical “special edition” prices.
Order Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition: Best Buy | GameStop | Humble Bundle
Now, onto the game itself. Nintendo Championships is essentially a slew of challenges that have you playing moments from classic NES games and trying to achieve a given goal as quickly as possible. These range from really short and simple (grab the sword at the start of The Legend of Zelda) to much more challenging (beat Super Mario Bros.), and I think the structure of the game is wonderful. The way it starts out by having you do the simplest things gives you a feel for how important every little movement can be. You learn from experience that valuable milliseconds can be gained or lost in something as basic as the angle of a jump.
In this regard, it feels like a real gateway to the joys of speedrunning. By the time you’re tackling one of the game’s more elaborate challenges that see you completing an entire stage or even an entire game, you intrinsically understand that it’s a matter of putting all the pieces together, trying to pull off every movement as gracefully and effectively as you pulled off the movements in those much smaller challenges you started with. I have probably played World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. hundreds of times over the course of my life, and yet Nintendo World Championships pushed me, for the first time ever, to really focus on completing it as quickly as possible, and it felt like a totally different stage. Simply beating 1-1 is easy as pie. Beating it really quickly and efficiently? That takes practice and determination. Repeatedly, Nintendo World Championships thrilled me by giving me exciting new ways to tackle games that I’ve been intimately familiar with for most of my life, and I suspect that I’ll continue having fun going back to it for some time and trying to improve my rating in some of the game’s many challenges.
But here’s where we get to the game’s colossal oversight. Do you know what would have made me (and, I suspect, thousands of other players) way more enamored with these challenges, and way more determined to come back to them again and again to improve our times? Leaderboards. Particularly friend leaderboards. Look, if I knew that a pal of mine had picked up the Screw Attack power-up in Metroid .03 seconds faster than I had, you’d better believe I’d be obsessed with doing it again and again until I’d surpassed her time. For me, this game could have been the hottest source of online competition since Pac-Man Championship Edition burst onto Xbox Live way back in 2007. And you know what Pac-Man CE offered on top of leaderboards that helped make it such a competitive sensation? The opportunity to watch replays of your friends’ games, to identify exactly how they’d edged past you to the tune of 125,000 points.
There’s absolutely no reason why Nintendo World Championships shouldn’t offer both leaderboards and replays for its challenges. We already know the game stores replay data! One of its modes is called Survival Mode, and it pits you against ghost replays from seven other players in races to complete three challenges. Okay, Nintendo. So you have the damn data. Please, let me watch my friends’ best attempts at completing a loop of Donkey Kong, or beating Mouser in Super Mario Bros. 2. Speedrunning is as much about cooperation and sharing information as it is about competition, and even if you see how a friend shaved five seconds off their time in a given challenge, you still have to execute the technique. It’s absurd that I have to take to Twitter to share information like this with my friends and fellow players, instead of them just being able to watch my replay in-game.
Obviously, I’m speaking as a die-hard NES fan here, but god, this misstep by Nintendo is so crushing. I really think NWC could have and should have been a game that brought people together and had us enthusiastically competing at its myriad challenges for many weeks. It could have been one of the games of the summer. Instead, because Nintendo failed to implement sensible online features, it’s an experience we can only really enjoy in isolation. It’s an oversight that, to me, is so mind-boggling I can scarcely believe it. I keep expecting Nintendo to announce that they’re patching in support for challenge-specific leaderboards and the ability to watch friends’ replays. But I doubt it will actually happen. This is Nintendo we’re talking about, a company that, for all its brilliance, has frequently been well behind the curve when it comes to knowing what to do with online functionality.
To be fair, there is ONE online leaderboard in the game, in the appropriately titled World Championships mode. Here, each week, you and players all over the world can compete in a series of five challenges, and once the week is out, you’re shown how you ranked against everyone else. That’s all well and good, but it feels grossly insufficient. I don’t just want to compete against the masses once a week. I want to have a spirited back-and-forth with my closest friends as we each obsessively try to be the fastest to grab the first mushroom in Super Mario Bros. or to beat Ridley in Metroid. God, it’s just so disappointing. My only hope is that the title of this game—Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition—hints that in the future, we may see other entries, a SNES Edition, perhaps an N64 Edition, and so on, and that, by the time those come around, Nintendo decides to add the features this game is so glaringly missing.