Platform: Switch Age: 3+ Verdict: ★★☆☆☆ Nintendo World Championships – NES Edition Nintendo World Championships – NES Edition - a challenge from Legend of Zelda A compilation of 13 Nintendo titles from the golden NES era? Sign me up! But wait, not so fast. This would be a tasty menu of mid-80s marvels – bulked out with a little filler – were they the full games. But Nintendo has other ideas here, reviving the concept of speedruns through sliced-and-diced sections of its NES catalogue.
The notion is a callback to the eponymous real-world esports competitions Nintendo used to run in the 90s, which in turn gave rise to a couple of game spin-offs for Wii U and 3DS entitled NES Remix. This new NWC – NES edition presents a long series of challenges (approximately 150) carved out of 8-bit classics such as Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros 1, 2 & 3, plus a few not-classics such as Balloon Fight and Ice Climber. Rather than asking you complete levels in their entirety, the game presents you with mostly bite-sized tasks such as reach a certain area, grab a particular object or defeat a certain number of enemies – all against the clock.
Some missions, which we’ll generously call tutorials, last no more than seconds and are insultingly easy. In the Legend of Zelda’s first challenge, for instance, hero Link must scurry approximately 30 pixels on-screen and grab a sword. Taa-daa! Clearly, the trials become more elaborate but, crucially, you’re encouraged to re-run every one to shave seconds or fractions of seconds off your time.
Completing each mission earns coins that can be used to unlock new challenges in any of the 13 titles, though you must beat them in order of escalating difficulty. In truth, it’s only in the latter stages of each game’s checklist that things get truly interesting. The level sections become longer and the tasks intricate enough that Nintendo includes a cheat sheet for some before you start.
The final Super Mario Bros 1 mission, for example, spans World 1-1 to World 8-4 but requires you to take secret routes to bypass whole chunks of the maps. It certainly held my attention far more than the micro-challenges earlier on. Vexatiously, Nintendo splits the Switch screen into two for every mission – one pane shows your current attempt while another displays the ghost of a previous effort.
It can’t be turned off and wastes a huge swathe of screen – particularly in undocked mode – that would be more useful if available to the pane you’re controlling. Competing against yourself may be enough for some but online multiplayer modes elevate the challenges to, well, world championships levels. You can’t compete live against another player – instead, you can play against others’ ghosts in Survival mode or by posting your best times in weekly challenges.
Local multiplayer, however, enables you to gather up to eight people in the same room to compete live on one console – though again the teensy size of the panes becomes a factor that means using a TV is practically a necessity. NWC feels like a missed opportunity for Nintendo. Far too many of the challenges demand little in the way of reflexes or brain power.
The absence of cross-pollination as we saw in the NES Remix titles – where Link barged into Mario’s world, for instance – also suggests a certain laziness. And would it have hurt Nintendo to unlock all 13 games to make them fully playable – even if it were to bump up the price a bit? NWC is a less of a world champion, more of an also-ran. Join the Irish Independent WhatsApp channel Stay up to date with all the latest news.
