Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition

Genre: Arcade / Party Game

Players: 1-8 Competitive (Local Split-Screen), Online Content Sharing, Online Leaderboards

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Review:

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is an Arcade-style Party Game released on the Nintendo Switch in 2024. Clearly a successor to the NES Remix games on Wii U and Nintendo 3DS, this game similarly has players completing small, bite-size tasks from an assortment of classic Nintendo Entertainment System games. However, while the NES Remix games’ biggest selling point was the scant few levels in those games that had mix-and-match gameplay with characters from one NES game in levels from another, Nintendo World Championships ditches this and instead places the focus on multiplayer competition, both online and locally.

Wellllll… okay saying you compete with other players online is a bit of a misnomer. In reality, you compete against the ghost performances of other players, either seeing their performances side-by-side with yours in an 8-player Survival Mode, or having your performance entered into a World Championships contest where you have no idea how well you’ve performed until the current contest ends (apparently over a half a week later), and you can redo any part of the contest as many times as you want and submit only your best times.

It’s a bit of a head-scratcher why it was set up like this, both because it minimizes the notion that you’re participating in a worldwide tournament, and also it drags down one of the biggest selling points of this game – competing with others. If you really want to play in real-time with another player, you’ll have to get them in the same room as you. There at least you’ll get some decent competitive play, though the breaks between game segments to explain the next one slow down the pacing some.

The games included here are Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Donkey Kong, Kid Icarus, Super Mario Bros. 2, Excitebike, Ice Climber, Balloon Fight, Super Mario Bros. 3, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, Super Mario Bros. 2 (J) AKA Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, and Kirby’s Adventure, almost all worthy of being called some of the best games from the NES library (though a few of these have become hopelessly dated).

The challenges within them vary in length and difficulty – as an example, the first Super Mario Bros. challenge has you racing to get a mushroom in 1-1 as quickly as possible, while the final challenge for that game has you beating the entire game from start to finish as quickly as possible using warp zones. Some challenges make the player think carefully about the best way to get to their goal quickly, but all of them have players trying to get the best time, not best score or most enemies defeated within a time limit or anything like that, which can make these tasks seem a bit repetitive.

The games are presented as they originally appeared, simple pixel art visuals and chiptunes, albeit with a murmuring crowd played over it. Sadly, the crowd doesn’t react to what you’re doing unless you really mess up or complete the task, and for the latter they cheer regardless of whether your time is a record-setter or merely adequate. This is joined by menus clearly inspired by the retro-futuristic spacey visuals of Nintendo’s original World Championships, joined by a peppy synthesized theme that does a decent enough job giving players a feel for the spirit of competition.

I will note one problem that I noticed on occasion, and I actually tested with multiple controllers to see if this was just an issue on my end – there is occasionally input lag and even missed button presses here, something that is a shocking oversight for a game built entirely around the concept of competition. When I press a button and have to wait a second for it to register, I don’t feel like the loss I got as a result was justified. I can’t seem to find anyone else complaining about this issue, so maybe it’s just me… but I can only report on my own experience.

In the end, as much as I love the concept of Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, I feel like there are just too many compromises here, and they harm the goals this game seems to be aiming for – the control issues are damning, but even if those don’t affect you, there’s still the disappointment of the only online competition to see here is in the form of ghosts and leaderboards (and not even standard leaderboards). There’s still some enjoyment to be had here, but it feels far less than what this should have been.

tl;dr – Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition presents classic Nintendo Entertainment System games cut up into smaller competitions and challenging players to compete in them for the best times. Unfortunately, the lack of variety in goal types, the inability to compete with others online in real-time, and some control issues really hobble this one out of the gate. There’s still some enjoyment to be found here, but it’s sadly not what it could have been.

Grade: C

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