Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition

Like NES Remix and WarioWare before it, Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition offers a good way to revisit challenging moments from a selection of classic NES games.

Nintendo World Championships is a fun introduction to competitive speedrunning with tons of nostalgia, even if its customization tools could be more robust.

For retro enthusiasts with access to likeminded friends and family, this Switch challenge collection is a genuine local multiplayer hit. For solo players and those looking to compete with others online, however, it’s a far less impressive package.

It feels like it would fit better as an additional mode to some sort of NES Remix compilation. And that’s ignoring the fact that NES Remix 2 already had a mode based on the Nintendo World Championships. Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition is a celebration of the classic console; it’s just one that lacks excitement and is too exclusive for its own good.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition doesn't make a great first impression. It's a downgrade in many ways to NES Remix and there's not as much variety or effort put into the challenges, nor any graphical tweaks to speak of this time around. However, stick with it, get into the competitive mindset, and start collecting up all the pins, icons, and top-ranked times on offer, and you may find yourself fully entertained. It's a slight thing, purely speed-focused, but we expect that'll suit plenty of folk who want a competitive outlet to display their old-school skills. And hey, it also doubles as a handy history of some iconic Nintendo gaming moments and mechanics.

While I’ll surely continue to chip away at my best times, Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition feels more like practice than the big game itself. It’s a great way to learn the basics of speedrunning, but the outlet for those acquired skills is in another castle. Maybe it’s all building toward the return of the real Nintendo World Championships. If that’s the case, cue the ’80s training montage music. I’m going big time.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition presents a promising concept, but a lack of features to support either dedicated speedrunners or any sort of serious online competition limits the package's appeal. There's certainly fun to be had revisiting this lineup of golden oldies, but Nintendo has only scored a bronze at the Nostalgia Olympics this time around.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is an interesting idea for a compilation, but it's hard to enjoy when so much of it reveals a game that blatantly feels rushed, be it in its weak online modes or the uneven spread of challenges with little variety. There are definitely nice challenges here to tackle that put up a good fight, and hints of clever inclusions like the Classified Information guides, but there's too little here at the moment to keep anyone hooked beyond a few hours at best. Sorry Nintendo, but this won't even get you the bronze.

At its best, Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a game I love, and I say that as someone typically not a speedrunning fan. But Nintendo did not give the NES the same respect here that they did in the NES Remix titles. This approach is more indifferent without question, reflecting a company going through the motions with this release. Only Nintendo can still manage to pull off a game this good-possibly one of my favorites of 2024-despite such bad habits.

"Retro challenges for the TikTok generation."