God, Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition It’s so frustrating. I am This almost completely in love with this assortment of timed challenges from NES games. In many ways, it feels like it was designed specifically for NES addicts like me, people who have an enduring fondness not only for well-regarded classics like The Legend of Zelda And Super Mario Bros. but also for the rawer and more frustrating first-party games on Nintendo’s first console, like Ice climber. But one huge and glaring flaw holds it back, relegating it to the status of an interesting curiosity rather than the conversational and competitive publication it could have been.
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Let me start with some of the things I really like about this game. First (and least importantly), I think the Deluxe Box Set that Nintendo is selling is pretty cool. It comes with a set of pins, postcards featuring the box art of all the games featured in the box set. Championshipsand a gold NES cartridge (strictly decorative). It’s Nintendo’s homage to itself, sure, but it’s a well-made assortment of goodies for far less than the typical “special edition” prices.
Now let’s move on to the game itself. Nintendo Championships is basically a series of challenges that have you playing through moments from classic NES games and trying to reach a given objective as quickly as possible. These range from very short and simple (grabbing the sword at the beginning The Legend of Zelda) much more difficult (to beat Super Mario Bros.), and I think the structure of the game is wonderful. The way it starts by having you do the simplest things gives you a sense of how important every little move is. You learn from experience that precious milliseconds can be gained or lost in something as basic as the angle of a jump.
In that respect, it feels like a veritable gateway to the joys of speedrunning. By the time you tackle one of the game’s more elaborate challenges that see you completing an entire stage or even an entire game, you inherently understand that it’s about putting all the pieces together, trying to pull off each move as gracefully and efficiently as you pulled off the moves in the much smaller challenges you started with. I’ve probably played World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. hundreds of times in my life, and yet Nintendo World Championships pushed me, for the first time, to really focus on finishing it as quickly as possible, and it felt like I was moving to a completely different level. Simply beating 1-1 is easy as pie. Truly beating it quickly and effectively? That takes practice and determination. On several occasions, Nintendo World Championships has excited me by giving me exciting new ways to approach games I’ve been intimately familiar with for most of my life, and I suspect I’ll continue to have fun coming back to it for a while and trying to improve my score on some of the game’s many challenges.
But here’s where we get to the game’s biggest oversight. Do you know what would have made me (and, I suspect, thousands of other players) that much more in love with these challenges, and that much more determined to come back again and again to improve our times? The leaderboards. Especially the friends leaderboards. Look, if I knew that one of my friends had collected the Screw Attack bonus in Metroid 0.03 seconds faster than me, you can bet I would be obsessed with doing it over and over again until I beat his time. For me, this game might have been the hottest source of online competition since Pac-Man Championship Edition burst onto Xbox Live in 2007. And you know what Pac-Man CE Featured at the top of the leaderboards that helped make it such a competitive sensation? The ability to watch replays of your friends’ games, to see exactly how they overtook you by 125,000 points.
A screen displaying the writer's online profile along with a number of "Ghost Competitors" in the game's survival mode.
Nintendo World Championships clearly stores ghost data, as it is necessary for the game’s survival mode.
Screenshot: Nintendo / Kotaku
There is absolutely no reason why Nintendo World Championships The game shouldn’t feature both leaderboards and replays for its challenges. We already know that the game stores replay data! One of its modes is called Survival Mode, and it pits you against the ghost replays of seven other players in races to complete three challenges. Okay, Nintendo. So you have that damn data. Pleaselet me watch my friends’ best attempts at completing a loop Donkey Kongor beat Mouser in Super Mario Bros. 2Speedrunning is as much about cooperation and information sharing as it is about competition, and even if you see How a friend managed to gain five seconds on a given challenge, you still have to perform the technique. It’s absurd that I have to use Twitter to share information like this with my friends and other players, instead of allowing them to simply watch my in-game replay.
Obviously I’m speaking as a die-hard NES fan here, but my goodness, this misstep from Nintendo is so crushing. I really think CNO could and should have been a game that brings people together and has us enthusiastically competing in its countless challenges for many weeks. It could have been one of the games of the summer. Instead, because Nintendo has failed to implement sensible online features, it is an experience that we can only really enjoy in isolation. It is an oversight that, to me, is so mind-boggling that I find it hard to believe. I keep expecting Nintendo to announce that they are updating support for challenge-specific leaderboards and the ability to watch friends’ replays. But I doubt that will actually happen. We are talking about Nintendo, a company that, for all its genius, has often been very late to the game when it comes to figuring out what to do with online features.
A screen showing the only real leaderboard in the game, for the Weekly World Championships mode.
Yeah, I’m ranked in the top 58 percent!
Screenshot: Nintendo / Kotaku
To be fair, there is ONE online leaderboard in the game, in the aptly named World Championships mode. Here, each week, you and players from around the world can compete in a series of five challenges, and once the week is over, you’re shown how you stacked up against everyone else. That’s all well and good, but it feels like a pretty big gap. I don’t want to just compete against the masses once a week. I want to have a lively chat with my closest friends while we all obsessively try to be the fastest to catch the first mushroom. Super Mario Bros. or to beat Ridley in Metroid. My God, this is so disappointing. My only hope is that the title of this game…Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition—hints that in the future we might see other entries, a SNES edition, maybe an N64 edition, etc., and that by then Nintendo will decide to add the features that this game is sorely lacking.
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