Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition Review

thesixthaxis.com:

The Nintendo Entertainment System is a true industry icon, but has a somewhat more diminished role in the memories of many British gamers. Unlike in the US and Japan where it reigned supreme, the NES was less ubiquitous over here, and I personally found myself more immersed in the Amiga and Atari wars, before Mario-mania took over with the Super Nintendo. I did have a mate with a NES and so had some time with the little grey box, but not enough for it to be deeply embedded in my childhood memories. However, Nintendo’s focus on legacy franchises and rereleasing its most famous titles has resulted in a kind of second hand nostalgia.

Inspired by the occasional real world championships, Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition brings a competitive tilt to retro NES gaming on the Switch as you are challenged to take on bite-sized sections of the console’s most famous titles and complete them in the fastest possible time. With a sizeable line-up of games and dozens of individual missions across each, this is a veritable playable museum of Nintendo’s first console.

Booting up Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition brings you to a menu offering solo and local multiplayer modes. The former contains three main game modes – Speedrun, World Championships, and Survival. The latter two here require a Nintendo Switch Online membership, and with servers only opening at the start of the week, the bulk of my time with the game has therefore been spent on the Speedrun mode. There are 169 micro challenges here to challenge and master, serving as training for the online sections as well as being compulsive in their own right. These challenges are spread across 13 games but not equally as some have over 20, whilst poor Ice Climbers and Excite Bike only have 6 each.

The lineup includes most of the system’s iconic titles, but the lack of games by Capcom and Konami is a missed opportunity. Instead we have Nintendo’s first party range fully represented with four Marios, both Zeldas, Metroid,