Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is an edition dedicated to millennials who kill milliseconds

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a finely crafted nostalgia trip in the vein of the decade-old NES Remix games, tapping into the competitive spirit of the esports event Nintendo launched over 30 years ago. While it’s another collection of well-worn NES titles repackaged as a mini-game speedrunning challenge, I can’t put it past Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition My thumbs (and my work deadlines) are suffering.

Nintendo’s new collection features 13 classic NES games, presented as a series of increasingly difficult challenges. The collection’s Speedrun mode is the main attraction, with 150 events spread across titles such as Super Mario Bros., The Legend of ZeldaAnd Donkey Kongin which players are asked to complete a short and enjoyable task, such as picking the first mushroom Super Mario Bros.or complete a level in Ice climber – as fast as possible.

It may not sound incredibly convincing on paper, but in practice, shaving a few tenths of a second off your best time is strangely intoxicating. As I wrote this sentence, I had just replayed a particular level in a Super Mario Bros. I completed the challenge 12 more times, ultimately dropping my score by 0.13 seconds. Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition It makes me feel like a real speedrunner, without the years of practice.

Image: Nintendo

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is designed for speed, both in the brevity of certain tasks — a Super Mario Bros. 2 The challenge only takes 1.1 seconds to complete with an S rating, but be aware that these challenges load and reload quickly. If you skip, you only have to press two buttons to instantly restart a level. Only a handful of challenges last longer than a minute, and they usually include trials that span the entirety or multiple levels of a game.

World Championships mode attempts to bring the spirit of the original Nintendo World Championships competition back to life on a global scale and connected to the Internet. Each week, players are faced with five rotating challenges, ranging from normal to hard-to-master. This week’s challenges are: Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, MetroidAnd Super Mario Bros. 2and players have unlimited attempts to improve their times before the contest deadline. So far, I’ve only competed with people who also had an early copy of the game; there’s no doubt our scores will pale in comparison to those of professional speedrunners when they get their hands on it. Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition.

But Nintendo was smart to think about its audience: aging millennials and Gen Xers who grew up on the NES. In addition to global leaderboards for the world championships, Nintendo will also release leaderboards by birth year, meaning players will be able to compare their times and skills with players of the same age who also have declining reflexes and little free time.

Image: Nintendo

Players can also compete against other players using their “ghost data” (records of other players’ runs in various challenges) in Survival mode. This mode uses a similar set of challenges to World Championships and has the appearance of earning trophies and in-game coins to spend on cosmetic items, but it doesn’t offer much else.

Additionally, there’s a Party mode, where up to eight players can compete locally on a single screen in themed challenges that vary in difficulty. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to play this mode to its full potential, but competing with my wife in speedrun-focused challenges confirmed that she prefers to play Mario Kart 8 (or, more honestly, The Sims 4 while I help him choose stain treatments for the furniture).

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is filled with delightful, nostalgic touches that reinforce its retro authenticity. It uses the Nintendo Power typographic treatment throughout the menus and even resurrects that magazine’s “Classified Information” section for in-game tips and tricks that show you how to tackle the collection’s toughest challenges. And in World Championships mode, the game layers the sound of a cheering crowd over the game’s audio, making you feel like you’re participating in one of the Nintendo World Championships that Nintendo has hosted over the decades.

Image: Nintendo

The biggest complaint I have about Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is its meager selection of games. The catalog includes only 13 NES games, all published by Nintendo, and it lacks some obvious 8-bit classics, like Punch-out!!, Dr. Mario, Donkey Kong Jr.and others that were part of the NES Remix series and the NES Classic Edition. This small selection of games stands out because Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition Players are invited to choose their favorite NES (or Famicom) game, a catalog that includes hundreds of titles. Hopefully Nintendo will inject more NES classics and speedrunning challenges to keep the collection fresh over the coming months.

What is offered in Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a delight. I don’t think it will make me any better at playing Nintendo’s older 8-bit games, but the challenges it presents are cleverly and cleanly designed. The collection lets me approach a small group of familiar NES classics from a new perspective, reinforcing just how timeless some of Nintendo’s early games are.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition will be released on July 18th for Nintendo Switch. The game was tested on Nintendo Switch using a pre-release test code provided by Nintendo. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find Additional information on Polygon’s ethics policy here.