Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is one of the most interesting Nintendo releases of the past few years. I certainly did not have Nintendo repackaging 13 Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) titles for Switch on my 2024 bingo card, especially as these games are available through the Nintendo Switch Online service. After diving in and spending time with the game throughout the last week, I’m quite surprised (and happy) to share that this package is a lot of fun. It’s certainly not for everyone, but there’s a solid amount of content here that makes this release worthwhile.
To understand the titling of this release, we have to go back to the origins of the NWC. The Nintendo World Championships first appeared in 1990, with Nintendo taking the competition across almost 30 cities in the United States. Each contest crowned a City Champion, with each champion competing in the finals round in Los Angeles later that year. There, contestants competed on a custom Nintendo Entertainment System cartridge that featured minigames of titles like Super Mario Bros. and Tetris. The event phased out afterward, though Nintendo revived it in both 2015 and 2017.
With Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, Nintendo is inviting you to bring the competition of the NWC into your own home. New minigames from classic NES titles like Super Mario Bros., Metroid, The Legend of Zelda, Balloon Fight, and more are available. Over 150 minigames are available to discover, each divided into one of four categories: Normal, Hard, Master, or Legend. As you complete minigames and earn higher scores, you can earn coins, which are used to unlock more challenges and custom icons for your profile. Most of your time will be spent here, in Speedrun Mode.
The Championships Await
You can choose to play these challenges solo or with up to eight players. Playing solo, you will see your high score run to the right of your screen, with your current run on the left. Each time is given a score rating, such as S, A++, B, etc. While there certainly is replayability with each challenge, attempting to beat your score can get old quickly. You can earn a pin for each challenge, but it’s merely a collectathon that lets you pick one to tag to your profile. It’s something, yet it wasn’t enough to keep me hooked. Luckily, you can take the speedruns online with two modes.
First, there’s Survival Mode. Here, you’re thrown in with seven other players in an elimination round where you have to score in the top half of players each time. However, these players aren’t playing in real-time – this is the ghost data of players similar to your skill level. This sort of reminds me of Ghost Battles from Tekken 8, where you battle it out against the data of other players you have faced online. I had quite a few runs in this mode that ran down to the wire, especially as every millisecond counts. Placing in the top half of each round is no easy task; it provides a fun refresh of the traditional Speedrun Mode.
However, this mode is far from perfect. Unfortunately, you can only choose between two ongoing divisions, the Silver Division or the Gold Division. Each of these offers three hand-picked minigames that rotate out each week. While these are fun, I wish you could choose which minigames to play or at least have more options available. Only having six minigames, sometimes less if there is overlap, per week for online play is not ideal for those looking to spend hours in Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition.
Alongside Survival Mode, the other main mode (and true star of the show) is World Championships. Similar to Survival, a group of minigames will rotate in and out each week. Five challenges are played in a gauntlet-style match, with the best times for challenges logged. You can choose which challenge to attempt, and you can keep attempting it until the week is over. Some players only try their hand at one or two challenges, while others attempt all five.
Winners are revealed once the entry period ends, with your times matched up against players all across the world. Nintendo has even opted to showcase your performance based on birth year, which is a fun touch. Especially since the opening text of the game poked fun at the many people who were likely not even alive when NES came out. Once the results are revealed, you can watch replays from the winners to see what their strategy was.
I genuinely like World Championships as a mode, but like Survival, it can sometimes feel quite bare. Only having five challenges to attempt per week is scarce, and I do feel Nintendo could have released multiple tournaments focused on different games alongside the main one. It is a little frustrating that you cannot see a real-time leaderboard in a mode for competing against others, but I assume that would be challenging to handle with thousands of updates every few minutes.
Finally, there’s Party Mode. This is the best offering of Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition—a way for you and a group of local players to race against each other with quick and easy rounds. If you’re interested in playing with friends, this is a fantastic way to break out your Switch in place of traditional party games like Mario Party or Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. The chaos of the byte-sized challenges offers a wide variety of fun, with so many challenges to push through. You absolutely need a large display for this, though. Even with the larger Switch OLED display, seeing more than two players is challenging.
And now, we’ve arrived at arguably the most disappointing aspect of this collection: none of these 13 NES games are fully playable in Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition. Having spent a week playing this game, I’m not sure why full versions aren’t available. Even though each can be played with Nintendo Switch Online, it feels like a misstep not to offer them as part of this bundle. Every challenge takes place at a different point in the game, so it can be a little offputting to realize you’ll need to exit the application to play the full title.
While the games offered are fun, I was sort of surprised to see the lack of major games like Tetris or Punch-Out!!. Especially the former, as it was featured in the original Nintendo World Championships for NES. Another title that was part of the NWS 1990 cartridge, Rad Racer, is also missing. There is certainly plenty to do with the 13 available titles, but a few more would have gone a long way. I would have loved to attempt to race against others to best Mr. Sandman or King Hippo. Overall, we can only hope that Nintendo will aim to add new games with fresh challenges as time goes on.
A Solid Foundation
At $30, this is an appropriately priced release. If you’re someone who plays alone most of the time, I do not recommend picking this one up unless you’re invested in speedrunning games. Playing solo can be extremely tedious and repetitive, but there is certainly a title that makes sense as a party game. The multiplayer mode can get competitive extremely quickly, and the bite-sized challenges allow for quick rounds that keep things fresh.
If you love challenges, this is certainly a fun title to take on. I can personally attest to the difficulty some of these levels bring: I had my wisdom teeth out this week, and this game provided plenty of challenges to keep me occupied. While I’m not the best at speedrunning, Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition provided me with new insights into some of my favorite NES titles that had never previously occurred to me.
While I certainly would like to see more updates after launch, I’m curious to see how or if Nintendo chooses to push further with this release. This is a unique title with a very specific goal, and it could greatly benefit from expansion onto other consoles. Could we see an SNES or N64 Edition at some point? The sky is the limit, and this release serves as a very solid footing for the future.
Nintendo provided Final Weapon with a Nintendo Switch copy of Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition for review purposes.
