How fast can you get that very first mushroom in Super Mario Bros. World 1-1? I’m talking milliseconds. Scraping every millisecond of mushrooms or similarly sized challenges, like killing four Oktoroks in a single screen in The Legend of Zelda or jumping to the top of an alien-infested pit in Metroid, is the most fun I’ve had in Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, which once again remixes the legendary 1980s library. Unlike WarioWare, NES Remix, and Super Mario 99, this time around it’s focused solely on speedrunning, and while the challenges lack variety, it’s still fun to play these old games in a new way.
Challenges range from short, like completing the first level of Super Mario Bros., to shorter, and surprisingly, the shorter the better. You’re ranked on a scale and rewarded with grades for even the slightest progress. For example, repeating the three jumps needed to collapse the Wendy O. Koopa boss into her candy shell in Super Mario Bros. 3 can be reduced to a series of nervous arcs, fascinatingly etched into your eyes and muscle memory, repeated over and over again to earn that precious S rank. It’s fun to challenge yourself, especially knowing that you’re developing skills that can be tested online against others.
Mario’s (but not Luigi’s, in both versions of Super Mario Bros. 2) precision jumping lends itself perfectly to speedruns. Likewise, in a different way, Link’s little punches on The Legend of Zelda’s mathematically rigid grid that lets you traverse a dungeon by finding the right path to crush each enemy before moving on. The best games allow for methodical refinement through repetition.
On the other hand, there’s Kirby: the slowest, most unwieldy blob Nintendo has ever invented, aside from maybe Ice Climber or Balloon Fight Guy. All three of them are here, and while speedruns based on these characters aren’t inherently difficult, they’re just not as fun to repeat. The movements are imprecise and make you feel sloppy – not ideal for a budding speedrunner, and it means honing your skills in these games is tedious. Thankfully, some of the bad games like Balloon Fight and Ice Climbers have very little challenge to overcome, so they’re not much of a barrier to 100%ing the Nintendo World Championships. However, Kirby’s Adventure, inexplicably, has the most going for it of any game in this collection except SMB3, as if it were some sort of speedrunning icon that we should all aspire to conquer. That’s simply not the case.
The biggest obstacle for aspiring speedrunners at the Nintendo World Championships is the Switch’s Joy-Con. NES games require precise button presses, and the Switch’s lag-free handheld mode should be a perfect match (enable your lag-free game mode on that TV when it’s docked!), but the Joy-Con’s terrible analog sticks, A and B button placement, and all that non-ad-pad buttons are supposed to be, make the Nintendo World Championships challenges nearly unplayable on a Switch out of the box. A couple of clean jumps over that blocky pyramid at the end of Super Mario Bros. World 1-1 at Mach speed with the Joy-Con are either impossible or so unlikely that I haven’t managed to do them once yet. They just don’t respond to the speed or accuracy of button presses the way you’d like. Thankfully, a Pro Controller or other respectable third-party gamepad solves these issues, though the analog stick is still much better than the not-a-D-pad on the Pro. The NES controller accessory is perhaps the most effective and authentic way to play these NES-based games, but I haven’t been able to test it, and the Pro has served me well.
The meta-goal of the Nintendo World Championships is to unlock large grids of stuff through your speedrun scores and online victories. You can unlock more microgames (there are 156 in total) and cosmetics like pins and pixelated avatars that appear alongside your character in multiplayer. Unlocking everything in a single game’s category unlocks a Legendary Challenge, which ranges from beating an entire dungeon in Kid Icarus or Zelda II to beating Super Mario Bros. from top to bottom.
Now, beating Super Mario Bros., even going slowly, is no easy feat – worlds 8-3 and 8-4 are tough levels compared to yesterday And Current standards. But in Nintendo World Championship races, dying only sends you back a few seconds to try again. Even if you lose valuable time, you won’t have to play from the beginning to finish a race – and if you fail to get under Bowser’s weird little feet at the end of World 8-4 on your first try, you can try again and probably get the grade you were aiming for. This way, I was able to finish each mission strong, allowing me to unlock everything and choose what I wanted to replay and polish. I did, however, have to practice for a few minutes every now and then in the online modes to get all the points I needed to quickly unlock all the offline microgames (I unlocked and played all 156 in about four hours), and you should know that anyone without the required Nintendo Online membership will not have access to the online modes (which are some of the fastest point earners) and will have to practice by repeating the offline microgames instead.
Speaking of online modes, there are two: World Championship and Survival. World Championship selects five microgames once a week, giving you seven days to submit your best time. Times are ranked globally and by your birth year, which is really fun. I feel better when I’m judged against my original NES peers and not the new whiz kids with superhuman reflexes. It’s fun to record your high scores, but I wish it would show me what the current leaderboards look like instead of keeping them until the end. Competing against a black box (and not being able to watch the competitors until the end of the challenge week) seriously dampens the thrill.
Survival mode is an elimination round that pits you against other players’ ghost data (basically, pre-recorded videos of other players that appear on your screen as you play) against which you must win to continue. All three rounds are always made up of the same games (in alternating order) that, you guessed it, refresh every week. This weekly cycle feels oddly restrictive: in this competition, you at least get results right away, but after playing the two weekly challenges in Survival mode, you just have to replay them to get points to spend on unlocking items.
While the online modes are somewhat slowed down by weekly wait times for leaderboards and new challenges, at least the couch-based competitive mode, which allows for up to eight players (sorry to anyone stuck with sideways Joy-Cons!), offers more immediately accessible content. In this mode, you can compete in single games or in series of pre-packaged microgames where points are awarded and a winner is declared at the end. The main problem with these modes is that, like WarioWare or Mario Party’s multiplayer minigames, those who have practiced the microgames in advance will inevitably have a head start. So inviting seven friends over to watch you win every time is a group foul until they catch up – it’s unlikely that anyone will get the exact pattern right to kill four Oktoroks in the most efficient way possible on a random screen in The Legend of Zelda without having practiced. Fortunately, you can choose to practice each microgame as the competition unfolds.