Between WarioWare, NES Remix, and Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition, Nintendo has a real penchant for breaking its games into chunks. Tiny chunks, often. When it comes to Nintendo World Championships, the unwieldy name is by far the longest thing in the game. The rest of the game is, what, 10 seconds, 50? It’s Nintendo doing TikTok, Nintendo in the editing room. And it’s fascinating.
Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition
Editor: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo
Availability: Available now on Switch.
Nintendo World Championship is a speedrunning game. The game takes 13 old Nintendo classics and cuts them into 150 one-shot challenges. So Super Mario Bros., for example, has a challenge to get a mushroom, a challenge to collect all the coins in an underground section, a challenge to beat 1-1 as fast as possible. Ice Climber has challenges to reach certain floors. The original Legend of Zelda has challenges to enter this cave and grab the sword, and challenges to defeat enemies as quickly as possible. Metroid…
Two things are obvious. First, I think the shorter challenges are by far the best. Maybe it’s because of all those years of playing WarioWare, but when the Nintendo World Championship throws you something that’ll take you 30 seconds to complete – say, a challenge to jump through a Metroid passage – my attention starts to wander. It’s not that I can’t handle doing something for 30 seconds – my ability to focus hasn’t atrophied that much yet – it’s more that the game somehow prepares me for very fast things, so when I’m asked to do moderately fast things, everything drags.
Here is the trailer for Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition. Watch on YouTube
Second, there aren’t many companies that have a catalog as well-suited to this as Nintendo. With games exclusively from the 8-bit era, Nintendo World Championship operates in a world of playful immediacy. Seeing a screen of Mario means you know what you’re doing. It’s the same with Zelda, Metroid, ExciteBike. You can see the whole world, not just a first-person slice. You don’t have to worry about camera controls or joysticks. My God, my life used to be simple. Sure, Sony could do something like that—ten seconds to break someone’s ankle with a hammer in The Last of Us, GO!—and it would be fascinating, but there would be a cognitive breath at the beginning of it all that’s completely absent from the NES games.
Even as I write this, I wonder if I’m entirely right. These games seem more immediate to me, but I’m extremely old at this point. Would they be as immediate to my ten-year-old, or is the cognitive slowdown simply because her games don’t feel like this anymore? I would wonder, but it’s her last week of school and she’s rehearsing for the play. Another time!
The Nintendo World Championship is broken down into four main components, I think. There’s the single player mode where you take on challenges and try to get good times. Then there’s a mode where you set times in specific challenges and wait to see how you do against the rest of the world, when the results are announced. Then there’s a mode that throws you into a series of challenges where you race against other players’ ghost data and try not to get eliminated. And then there’s the party mode.
It’s probably filler, coming at the end of a console’s lifespan, but it’s hard to grumble about it too much when it’s both so beautifully packaged, like an 80s American game show that would have aired in the middle of the night on a Friday in the 90s, and so idiosyncratic. And it’s funny, the idea of Sony or Microsoft doing the same thing. I’d love to see that, but what I’d really like to see is some kind of all-star indie game that does it. Create a river in Dorfromantik! Kill a shopkeeper in Spelunky! Onward! Outward! Faster and faster!
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