Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is all about millennials killing milliseconds

polygon.com:

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a finely crafted nostalgia trip, in the vein of the decade-old NES Remix games, that taps into the competitive spirit of the esports event Nintendo launched more than 30 years ago. Despite being another collection of well-worn NES titles repackaged as a minigame speedrunning challenge, I can’t put Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition down. My thumbs (and my work deadlines) are suffering because of it.

Nintendo’s new collection spans 13 classic NES games, which are presented as a series of escalating challenges. The collection’s Speedrun Mode is the main draw, featuring 150 trials spread across titles like Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and Donkey Kong, in which players are asked to perform a short and sweet task — like collecting the first mushroom in Super Mario Bros., or completing a level in Ice Climber — as fast as possible.

This may not sound incredibly compelling on paper, but in practice, shaving tenths of a second off your best time is strangely intoxicating. As I was writing this sentence, I just replayed a particular level in a Super Mario Bros. challenge 12 more times, ultimately dropping 0.13 seconds off my score. Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition makes me feel like an honest-to-goodness speedrunner, without the years of practice.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is built for speed, both in how short some of the tasks are — one Super Mario Bros. 2 challenge takes just 1.1 seconds to complete with an S-rating — but in how quickly these challenges load and reload. Whiff a jump, and you need only press two buttons to instantly restart a level. Only a handful of challenges last longer than a minute, and generally include trials that span full or multiple levels of a game.

The World Championships mode attempts to revive the spirit of the original Nintendo World Championships competition on a global, internet-connected scale. Each week, players are faced with five rotating challenges,