Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a retro speedrunning paradise

thesixthaxis.com:

While online gaming really thrown esports and competitive gaming into the spotlight over the past 15 years, the battle to be the very best gamer in the room goes back much, much further. Ardent gamers have been at it since the “Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics” were held by Stanford University students in 1972, but there’s been the rise and fall of countless gaming competitions in the decades since. While far from being a part of the yearly gaming landscape like Evo or QuakeCon, there’s still a special place in gaming lore for the Nintendo World Championships. And now you can bring that competitive spirit home with Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition.

It’s actually a little surprising that there’s only been three Nintendo World Championships, with a 25 year wait from the 1990 inaugural event to the anniversary to its anniversary revival in 2015, and then another entry two years later just as the Nintendo Switch was coming to the fore. It’s similarly surprising that it’s taken Nintendo seven years to decide to release a branded tie-in game, but it’s better late than never, right?

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, much like Nintendo World Championships Remix on the Wii U and the original Nintendo World Championships 1990 Game Pak that went before it, is all about taking classic NES games and breaking them down into mini stages and tasks for you to try and speed run your way through. That factor alone adds a huge compulsive urge to play, replay, better yourself and best the other names on leaderboard, or rivals who are closer to home.

It starts with 1-1, and a challenge that’s barely 5 or 6 seconds long (if you’re doing things right), to go left to right, hop over a Goomba, hit the second question block, and grab the mushroom that emerges. Seriously, I could play this time and time and time again trying to master it, and getting an S rank is going to require pixel precise jumping. There’s similarly miniscule, but addictive challenges to get you started in