Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition (Review)

Are you a true American, who was born in the 70s or 80s and thinks that the classic Nintendo Entertainment System is the best video game console ever made? And do you still love to compete in who can do things quickest? Well, then Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition was made for you, congratulations!

If not, then you might be wondering whether this game is really worth it or not... And to be upfront, this really should have been part of the Nintendo Switch Online service's offerings, alongside Tetris 99 and F-Zero 99. Instead, it costs 30 bucks, or twice as much if you're going for the Deluxe Set physical edition.

Under the hood you will get what's effectively a reskin of NES Remix, with a couple of main differences. There are only individual challenges, so no stages where you do a series of tasks. There are also no remixed levels or special conditions, it's all about doing a certain task or reaching a certain goal as fast as possible. You also don't have any lives or tries, instead it will rewind whenever you potentially screw up or do things that you're not supposed to, like a majority of possible glitches.

The rewind functionality is rarely ever useful, however. The timer will keep running, so there is a huge penalty attached to it. With shorter challenges you're always better off to reset. In addition, you don't have any control about how far it rewinds, where it might set you back into a situation where you just fall into your death again, potentially even keeping you in a loop... So, you have to reset anyway.

And when you reset, the three second countdown at the beginning can get a bit annoying, especially since the this may take longer than some of the challenge themselves... It's still good to have, because you want to be ready and already started with the right button(s) pressed, but it could be shorter.

Also, what could be better is the button layout, where NES Remix gave you Y as a second Select button, which is very useful and more comfortable for a variety of games, e.g. Metroid and Zelda II. At least, you can use X as an alternative to B, so that's something... But there are no control options of any kind, which is always a negative and a general problem with Nintendo.

As for the emulation itself, it feels similar to the Nintendo Switch Online offerings, meaning that you will experience the games in all their messy glory. There will be significant slowdowns whenever there are too many enemies on screen in Metroid, for example. The timer won't slow down for you, though, so you will have to take this into account.

For each challenge they've created a specific RAM save state (essentially a Suspend / Restore Point), so you should get the same RNG on each try, to make things as consistent as it gets. In practice this means that you can predict enemy movements in certain challenges, because they always will be the same, which then enables you to become even faster.

That's it for the basics, in total there are over 150 challenges to play, spread over 13 different NES titles, which is far less than what the NES Remix games had to offer, but it aims to be a bit more of a quality selection. Here is a list of the games in question:

• Ballon Fight
• Donkey Kong
• Excitebike
• Ice Climbers
  
• Kid Icarus
• Kirby's Adventure
  
• The Legend of Zelda
• Metroid
• Super Mario Bros.
• Super Mario Bros. - The Lost Levels
• Super Mario Bros. 2
• Super Mario Bros. 3
  
• Zelda II - The Adventure of Link
  

This should cover most of the fan favorites and focuses on the early Nintendo games that have aged best, though none of them have aged particularly well, except maybe Super Mario Bros. 3. You will still get some stiff and clunky stuff in there, like Donkey Kong, Ice Climbers, or even Kid Icarus and Metroid. And your enjoyment of the Nintendo World Championships will heavily depend on the enjoyment of these games.

At least the challenges weren't spread out equally, so the more popular games get more challenges than something like Excitebike. Also, you don't have to play other games first in order to get to the good stuff. You can just focus on whatever game(s) you like best, because everything you do is rewarded with coins, based on your score and the difficulty. Those coins then can be used to unlock challenges and purchase player icons based on the 13 games. So, you can technically play the same challenge over and over again to unlock everything in the game, even though you probably don't want to do it that way.

The score is determined by eight different ranks: C, B, B+, B++, A, A+, A++, and S. For the S-rank you usually have to get close to perfection, with a little leeway. So, getting those can be quite challenging, especially if this is your first contact with speedrunning. But it also heavily depends on the challenge in question and the required times, where some will give you an easier time than others.

As for the challenges themselves, they range from "short and sweet" to "speedrun the entire game, please". In case of Super Mario Bros., for example, you start with picking up the first mushroom and collecting some coins. This goes over into entire levels, until finally you have to beat the entire game. To be fair, this is the exception and it can be achieved within a couple of minutes thanks to the warp zones.

That is the game's "Legend" difficulty challenge, where each title gets one such lengthier task, some more than others. In case of the two Zelda games you will have to speedrun the entire first dungeon. Meanwhile, in Metroid you only have to do the final escape sequence, where the developers were merciful enough to leave out the atrocious Mother Brain fight before it.

For those Legendary Challenges you can read hints, called "Classified Information", where it shows you the intended route for the S-rank or other useful tips, so you don't have to look at online maps or guides of these games to figure it out yourself. These hints look like pages from classic manuals or strategy guides from that era, which is really awesome and something that more games should do.

The manuals used to be a fantastic source of information and beautiful artworks back in the day, where Nintendo slowly economized this to a point where modern games don't came with any manual at all. It's understandable, but games like TUNIC and now Nintendo World Championships show how you can bring these back within the game itself. It's very lovely!

This is entirely subjective, but you may find the shorter challenges to be more fun and addicting. In those you really focus on one task to get it done just right. Fight that one Lynel at the cave to the White Sword as quickly as possible. Again, again, and again until you get that one near-perfect try. It gets you into the "zone".

The longer the challenges become, however, the more it goes into conventional speedrunning territory, where you have to put everything together and optimize both in large and small scale. In some cases, like Super Mario Bros., it even feels like all the challenges before are just there to teach you how to speedrun the game in its entirety. And that might not be to everyone's taste.

But these longer challenges also often have more leeway for the S-rank, where you can afford to make some mistakes and potentially still get it. The Parapa Palace from Zelda II - The Adventure of Link is a great example of this, luckily.

However, this wouldn't be the "Nintendo World Championships" if this was just about personal highscores. There needs to be some competition and the game let's you go at it in three different ways: Party Mode, World Championships, and Survival Mode.

Party Mode let's you compete locally with up to eight players. Here you get different themed sets of challenges, or you can just create your own. You then score points based on your placement and the winner gets it all... This is entirely separate from the rest of the game (the one player mode), so none of your highscores here will have any effect. And this can run out of steam quickly, so don't bank on it for this to become your next party game.

Otherwise, you have the two "online" modes, Wold Championships and Survival. For both you get the same set of five challenges, which are going to change every Monday. In World Championships you get to play these challenges individually and you can try to achieve a highscore. New highscores will be transferred into the singleplayer Speedrun Mode, even if you haven't unlocked the given challenges yet. But this won't work the other way around, so you have to make a good score for the running competition.

You won't see your standings until that competition is over, however, so there are no real leaderboards to follow until then. That's probably not to demotivate players from trying their best, because seeing the highscores on online leaderboards can be daunting. And there is a sense of wonder of how well you did in the end... But for those who really want to compete for the top this is a questionable decision at best.

In Survival you will play three challenges back-to-back against the ghost data of seven other players. Each round the bottom half gets disqualified and you goal is to make it to the end. This is divided into Silver and Gold levels, where for the former you get generally more easier opponents, while in the Gold Division you're often up against people's best attempts, making this fairly challenging.

Winning here will earn you some pins, where there's 183 to unlock in total, most of them from scoring an A-rank in all the individual challenges. These pins are like little trophies (and also what the physical pins in the Deluxe Set are based upon), where you can show off one of them in pride next to your username.

The other customization a statement, like "Game Boy Generation", your favorite NES game from a comprehensive list, as well the aforementioned player icons. The latter are unlocked via coins and can get rather expensive, e.g. the awoken princess from Zelda II costs 1000. The hardest challenges only cost 300 to unlock, in comparison, so this may keep you busy for a while, grinding all that virtual money.

Finally, if you're super crazy about all of this and can't get enough, there is the "Legendary Trial" to unlock, where you will have to clear all 13 Legendary Challenges one after another, which can take half an hour. Good luck with that!

Conclusion

All in all, Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is another take on NES Remix, with a bit of competition sprinkled on top. If you enjoy speedrunning and mastering individually segments in video games, then you should have a good time with this, given that you don't mind the age of the games in question. Otherwise this title won't have much to offer...

Hopefully, Nintendo will move on from the NES with this concept and offer something for Game Boy and SNES generation in the future, or potentially even something based on individual franchises with a mix of different platforms.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition Impressions

Well, this is essentially NES Remix again... just with less games and less challenges per game and without any remix, but with online competition... without any leaderboards. The focus is a lot more on speedrunning individual chunks, where they've put quality over quantity with the selection of challenges.

And it can be quite addicting to the get one single thing just right for the S-rank, where I personally do enjoy these smaller tasks more than the longer ones. It can even ruin a potentially fun challenge if there's more to it than necessary, where the best example is probably the Ridley fight from Metroid. For some reason they thought it to be a good idea to include the room before in all its laggy glory.

To make things worse they let the game rewind whenever you might fall into lava, but you can't really set where you get back into the game, so it might just place you above the lava once more... The rewind is truly useless, especially if you're going for the S-ranks, because the timer keeps running, even as it rewinds. So, you're always better off just resetting.

Controls could also be better. Like in NES Remix, you still have X as an alternative to B, but Y isn't any longer a second Select button, which would especially be useful in Metroid for the missile switch. There are options for some things, e.g. how it displays the screen(s), but overall it's lacking.

My main problem with this game is similar to NES Remix, however: the only two NES games that I've ever played on the original hardware are The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II - The Adventure of Link. Those are the two NES games that I care about and not much else... I've also played and beaten Metroid, of course, but that's actually my least favorite game in the series. It's a bit too archaic for my taste, as are most NES games.

Now, there are 15 challenges for each Zelda game and I quickly got S-ranks in all of them. The only ones that gave me some trouble were "Labyrinth Champion" and "Rebonack Attack". The latter always was a painful bossfight for me, where here I really had to master it for the first time. And as for the Level 1 dungeon, I simply took a suboptimal route, because I've collected both keys in the rooms next to the entrance, where this isn't necessary. I should have looked at the "Classified Information" sooner, which are super awesome in this old strategy guide style, where being able to look at those is essentially a reward for itself.

Anyway, now I'm left with little motivation to go on. I'm giving some other games and challenges a try, also in combination with the "online" modes, but it just doesn't have the same spark. And while I am more interested in a potential SNES or Game Boy Edition, those still would come with many games and challenges I don't particularly enjoy playing, e.g. F-Zero.

What I'm trying to say here is that I personally would prefer something like "Nintendo World Championships: The Legend of Zelda Edition", where they focus on one franchise and include all games that are currently part of the Nintendo Switch Online emulation, so you would have up to ten Zelda games in total. This would really get me excited to complete everything and to compete in those weekly online tournaments.

It's understandable that they are doing this on a console basis, because otherwise many Nintendo games would never be featured at all. And hopefully these types of games are not stuck with the NES for all eternity, where a Game Boy Edition would probably be so much more fun for me. But they could also do these franchise editions in addition, at least for the most popular ones, like Super Mario and Zelda. Maybe as a free offering for the 40th anniversaries?

Got Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition Deluxe Set

Well, I already got this yesterday, because for some reason Nintendo decided with this fiscal year that their new games should launch on a Thursday... But this was on a Thursday, so I couldn't even be bothered to unpack it. Anyway, it's finally here, the big summer release that we've been waiting for... Not really, but it could be a nice diversion for in-between, where I already got hooked with beating some Octoroks as fast as possible.

As for the Deluxe Set, this is the only way of getting a physical copy of the game. It costs it much as a normal Nintendo Switch game would, but you get a variety of goodies on top:

There is a replica of the golden NES cartridge for the Nintendo World Championships, though they felt the need to use this game's logo on a black background, so it isn't exactly the same. And of course it's not a real NES game, it's just plastic, but it comes with even more plastic in the form of a standee, so you can put it nicely into a display cabinet.

In addition, you get a pin set, which is surprisingly nice, because it feels like little trophies. I'm normally not a big fan of such pins and I don't get Nintendo's obsession with them, but in this case it seems like a very good fit.

 

Finally, there is a card set with the original covers of all 13 NES games featured in the game. It's actually a very good selection, they've went with the absolute best games here, unlike NES Remix and NES Remix 2, where they had one too many of Nintendo's old games in there. On the backside you get some pixel arts:

And that's it. Nothing too special, but still neat. My only real complaint is that the cover of the card case still has the huuuge age ratings on it. Why is that? One of the biggest selling points of these Special Editions, at least for me personally, is to get a clean cover. And they are not even selling this separately!

Though, maybe they had planned to... The pin box also comes with a plastic wrapping that's normally used for My Nintendo stuff, complete with a bar code sticker for the item. Maybe they first made the retail game and those pins separately, but then decided to create this Deluxe Set instead. Add some more cardboard and plastic, and then sell it for full price. Oh, well, it's obviously working...

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition Announced

Well, Nintendo doesn't need a Nintendo Direct to announce new games, this one coming on July 18th. They've just posted a video, which is a bit cringe and dwells in the memories of past of Nintendo World Championships events. This never has been a thing in Europe, so other than the rare NES cartridge this isn't exactly some that you may have heard about outside of North America.

To me this looks a lot like NES Remix, which is one of the few Wii U titles that haven't made it onto the Nintendo Switch yet. The core idea is pretty much the same, where NES Remix 2 even had a remixed version of the original Nintendo World Championships. The main difference is that this is all about online leaderboards, because that's always fun, given that you love playing games to absolute perfection (I usually don't).

So, this is simply another title pushing the Nintendo Switch Online service, similar to Tetris 99 and alike, except that this one isn't for free. But it will still be eShop exclusive... unless you get physical "Deluxe Set". I will try to get my hands on the latter, but otherwise I probably won't bother with this.

The NES Remix games were diverting, however, some nice and casual fun, but I never found them all too engaging. I only ever cared about the Zelda and Metroid challenges, because those are the only NES games that I truly like.

It's also weird that they are calling this the "NES Edition", as if they are meaning to create a "SNES Edition" and potentially other editions later on. But there never has been a "SNES Remix" or a "Game Boy Remix", so this would be new territory. I would love something like this for Game Boy games, though.

35th Anniversary of Metroid

Well, look at that, it only takes a new Metroid title and Nintendo finally acknowledges one of the anniversaries of the franchise. It's been 35 years since Metroid was released for the Famicom and effectively what's Nintendo Sci-Fi version of The Legend of Zelda was born. And now it's time to celebrate the series for real. Happy Birthday, Metroid!

Anyway, we always knew that these anniversaries are just marketing ploys, but it still would be nice to get something more for Metroid this time around. An equivalent to Hyrule Historia would be awesome.

For now Nintendo has shared a new video, which confirms that Metroid Dread will really tie in to the secret gallery item from Metroid: Samus Returns, where a new side of the Chozo was presented to us. This could be exciting.

Metroid (NES) Revisited

Right before the release of Metroid: Samus Return I went through another classic Metroid game. In fact I revisited the classic Metroid game, the first one, released in 1986 on the NES. For this I again used the Wii U Virtual Console. It's a short game overall, so you can easily beat this in one evening, if you want to.

However, at first I was hesitating whether I actually want to play this or not. With the Zelda NES games I usually feel like they offer some unique gameplay within the series, where I enjoy replaying them to a degree. Especially Zelda II - The Adventure of Link is very different from the rest of the series, while The Legend of Zelda simply has his own charm and feels more like a sword beam shooter at times, which can be addicting.

Metroid on the other hand just feels like an underdeveloped prototype for the later games. Super Metroid has a very fitting name, because it's essentially a superior version of Metroid. It even takes place in the world of the first game, but tries to do everything bigger and better. Level design, controls, gameplay - everything has improved by a margin. And on top of that Nintendo even created a remake of the first game in the same style with Zero Mission. So, there doesn't seem to be a good reason to play the first game and unlike The Legend of Zelda it fails to captivate with its own classic 8-bit gameplay.

You can only shoot in three directions (left, up and right) and at the beginning of the game you can't even shoot things at your feet. You need the Wave Beam for that (or to use Bombs). It all feels somewhat quirky compared to the later games and even the most basic enemies like the Rios and Wavers can be super annoying early on, because they are so hard to hit and just fly right through you.

If you die, you start with 30 health and then you're out to farm energy balls, where enemies for the most time only leave 5 points of energy at a time, if any, while every mistake will cost you much more... Also, the Ice Beam does not do more damage and makes killing enemies even slower, because they don't take damage from being frozen. And then you're up to playing the ever-same boring corridors again and again. While getting through Norfair I almost was about to reset the game and say the magic words for the only way I knew the game could be fun:

NARPASSWORD

But I didn't and I have to say that the game gets a lot easier and manageable, as soon as you get the Varia Suit. You take considerably less damage then. I almost was about to enjoy the game, when this happened:

Why can't Metroid wall-jump?

There's one part in Norfair right before the Wave Beam, where you can fall down and not get out of the lava. With the Varia Suit it takes a while, before you die there, so you have to put the game aside and slowly wait for the inevitable. Lava in general seems to be something in this game, where it's easy to get stuck in.

Also, as soon as there are more than two enemies on the screen, the frame rate drops significantly and makes the game hardly playable at times, but it still keeps throwing more enemies at you than it can handle. The Screw Attack also often fails you, where you take damage instead of destroying an enemy... It all just doesn't feel very reliable, where the game is just not fun at times.

I personally think that they did a much better job with the sequel already, Metroid II - Return of Samus. While the controls, gameplay and the graphics are as simple as in the first game, the game works much better with its restrictions. It also introduced points, where you can refill your health and missiles, which is dearly missed in the first game, where grinding is your only option.

Anyway, despite all the shortcomings, I still made it to Tourian to hunt some Metroids and face Mother Brain.

But the latter has proven to be very difficult, because again there's too much happening at once on the screen, where you get hit from every direction, while you're fighting the low frame rate... So, this certainly won't become my favorite Metroid game, it might even be my least favorite. But let's hope that my new favorite Metroid title will be released today.