Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition has reshaped my brain this month. I can’t stop thinking about perfecting my scores in Balloon Burster (part of Balloon Fight) and Hammer Hustle (part of Donkey Kong). In my dreams, I am playing these stages over and over, attempting to climb an impossible mountain as hopes of achieving a high score drift away.
That’s the loop this game throws you into. Diving into its strange mini-game collection, you are endlessly reaching for perfect scores in bite-sized gameplay segments pinched from Nintendo’s most popular games – Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros., Kirby’s Adventure, and the like. Your tasks are many, and also relatively simple: place a bomb, grab a sword, pop a balloon, complete a course. But the challenge lies in your speedrunning skills.
It’s all about going fast – and not just fast, but perfectly fast. Nintendo World Championships encourages perfection of skill, as you run through stages and leap at precisely the right moment to grab the right pixel, to hit the right box, to defeat the right enemy. You can send your brain in circles lusting after those perfect S scores, with the temptation of achieving badges and accolades driving you onward.
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As a solo player, I found stages moreish and addictive, and there was ample pleasure in grabbing S and A++ scores – enough that I completed every stage, at varying degrees of success. Once the rush was over, Nintendo World Championships seemed slightly emptier – and it became clearer to me that solo play isn’t quite what the game is built for. Rather, Nintendo World Championships has a mind for multiplayer.
There is certainly pleasure in running through stages, perfecting your high scores and attempting to find exactly the right pixel to jump off (even as the game’s emulation replicates the slow screen load and glitches of the NES era). But it was in multiplayer battles that I found the most joy.
Multiplayer levelling
You’ve got a handful of modes in this collection: a solo mode, modes where you face off against player ghost data, online multiplayer modes, and Party Mode, where you can face your friends in rounds of mini-games. The fervour and panic inspired by Party Mode was a particular delight to see.
Playing through the many games of Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition solo is an exercise in perfecting movement, and understanding the limitations of NES games – the weird floatiness of jumps, slow area load, and unfair enemy attacks. In Party Mode, it’s essentially a free-for-all, as players of all experience levels attempt to guide Mario, Kirby, and pals to victory.
The accuracy of NES emulation lends itself to this mode incredibly well – because the pressure of winning is compounded by frustrating, archaic controls that are unintentionally hilarious. When the pressure is on, players will struggle to jump up ice blocks (in Ice Climber), and will repeatedly throw themselves down tunnels in Mario.
In several rounds of multiplayer gameplay, I had one player completely stuck, repeating the same mistakes over and over, while everyone else had finished the chosen course. This was, of course, helped significantly by the hooting and hollering that accompanied the act. It certainly didn’t make this player panic more.
In this setting, Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition shined brightly, eclipsing any experience I had as a solo conquerer. The rapid clip of games and the comedy of an enthusiastic crew combined to create a fun, frantic party experience that was a total blast while it lasted.
The only challenge was that returning to solo mode was like doing the walk of shame. You taste the heights of what Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition can do, and in comparison, solo mode feels far less satisfying. It lacks a needed depth to flesh out its many challenges, and at times, it feels like you’re completing mini-games just to complete them.
The comparison I’d give is to WarioWare. This series operates on a similar premise – in that you’re completing an array of mini-games at rapid fire speed. But WarioWare leans more heavily into narrative and comedy, with each mini-game housed within a memorable, quirky tale. While simple, this framing lends stakes to each game, and encourages you to keep trying.
In opposition, Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition lets you loose on an array of video games that can be played in any order, and it doesn’t really matter if you die. You simply hop in for rounds of gameplay, and repeat stages endlessly until you figure out their quirks. There’s satisfaction in that loop at first, but it was hard not to feel a sense of emptiness as time went on, and without friends to paper over the game’s lack of depth in solo mode.
This game is absolutely “for” certain people – speedrunners who enjoy a good challenge, competitive online gamers, or those looking to indulge their nostalgia – but fitting none of these categories, I found myself wanting more from Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition. Despite a moreish opening loop of mini-games, it’s not long before the game’s lower depths are plumbed.
Three stars: ★★★
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition
Platform(s): Nintendo Switch
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Release Date: 18 July 2024
A code for Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition was provided and played for the purposes of this review. GamesHub reviews are rated on a five-point scale.
