I keep thinking I’ve reached a point where I’ve played the classic NES games so many times in so many different ways that I’m completely done with them.

Then something like Nintendo World Championships on Switch comes along and somehow, suddenly I’m right back in the room.

As someone who grew up with these games, in part, these have become something of a comfort food for me. I adored the NES Remix games back in the Wii era and loved the way it kind of dissected the games into smaller sections to create a more elaborate time attack mode.

What I immediately enjoyed about Nintendo World Championships, though, is how some of the later challenges actually get you to play several levels of the game back to back – and in the case of the original Super Mario Bros, you can technically play the entire game on Master Mode!

But that’s not really the point of Nintendo World Championships. Here, your aim is always trying to finish the section in the fastest time possible. And some of the sections are random, like collecting Samus’ Morph Ball in Metroid 1 or jumping in a rocket from Super Mario Bros 2.

Some are diabolically hard too, like getting to Twinbellows in Kid Icarus or venturing through the Lost Levels, but the game does a decent job of categorising when challenges will be normal, hard, master or legend. Though there’s definitely a few hard and master challenges I had a harder time with than master!

The standard mode is Speedrun where you can cruise through a selection of the NES most known and beloved games, including hits like Ice Climbers, Zelda 1 and 2, Balloon Fight and Kirby. Each game usually starts out easy to get you to grips with the mechanics and controls. Like with Donkey Kong, for example, the first challenge asks you to climb a ladder!

You’re graded on your time in each challenge, with the possibility of even getting an S Ranking depending on how fast you go, but of course you can replay as many time as you like to improve your score. In fact, that’s what the game hopes you’ll do across its various modes.

As you beat each challenge, you’ll earn coins, and of course the better you do, the more coins you’ll earn. But it also bases it on factors like how well you’ve done on a certain game and even if you’ve beaten a previous time. You’ll then be able to spend to unlock another challenge within a game, with easier challenges being cheaper and tougher ones getting more expensive.

It does reach a point where unlocking all of Speedrun can get tricky by just sticking to the same mode – especially if you also want to play around with Player Icons which I’ll come onto shortly – but fortunately there’s other modes to dive into.

The most interesting being World Championships, of course. Every week, there will be a crop of random challenges bundled together where you can compete for World Rankings! You can enter as many times as you like in a week and your best time on any particular game is logged, recorded and uploaded to the Championship Server.

So far it’s been two normal challenges, two hard, and one Master and while we’ve already seen a bit of repetition, there’s plenty of options for Nintendo to tap into in the weeks ahead.

Another cool edition is ‘Birth-Year Rankings’ so you can enter a pool of players in the same age bracket as you and compete for a high score. The game tells you how old you were when the game released and even gives you a medal to tell you in what percentile you’re in.

While I won’t be competing for an actual World Championship anytime soon, I was feeling a nice sense of gratification competing and seeing my score wasn’t awful and in fact was above my expectation at times. The game does a good job of making your efforts seem important.

The playerbase seems relatively healthy as well with around 40,000+ people playing the first World Championships, so while we’re not talking six figures just yet, you’re certainly challenging yourself with a decent amount of players right out of the gate.

One thing I’m also glad that’s been included is Champion Replays. While I love seeing how I compete with the rest of the world, curiosity means I need to see how good the best of the best is. It’s usually a pretty humbling experience!

Further still is a Survival Mode with Silver and Gold Divisions based on the World Championship of the week where you can compete your best time against seven other players in an elimination style round robin. The top four players will progress through Round 1, with the Top 2 making it to the final and then you find yourself in a sudden death, fastest time wins situation.

The tricky thing here is the Survival Mode sees the challenges alternating, so you could find yourself with the hardest challenge first and then a relatively easy one for the final. It’s a nice adrenaline centric challenge which kind of throws me back towards the Tetris 99 style of gameplay where you can see how others are getting on just to the right of  you.

Your success in the above also contributes to your coin count. Which is just as well as you’ll also need to spend them to unlock all the player icons. And there’s a lot of them across all the centric games in Nintendo World Championships! From Stars in Mario to Donkey Kong himself, Link, Ridley and everyone else you can imagine.

Pins can also be unlocked by fulfilling certain conditions, like getting an A rank on a level, competing in the World Championships, beating Challenges or winning a Survival Mode Division. These can be added to your Player Profile when players want to check you out at a glance on the rankings, alongside fun Hype Tags and your Favourite NES Game. Astonishingly, it seems like every NES game ever released is on there!

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a blast. The correct games are playable here and while you could argue one or another could or should be here, it’s hard to dispute the selection offered here doesn’t best represent that era. Though maybe Tetris should have got a look in, as well!

Obviously you need to have some enjoyment of classic NES games in 2024 and many of the limitations and frustrations do rear their head like lag and slowdown on certain challenges, the brutal difficulty curves and the slippery, slidey nature of the controls at times. It’s as much about precision as it is luck on occassion.

If you’ve played any NES Games on Nintendo Switch Online and can’t get on with them, this isn’t going to be for you. But if you grew up in that vintage era, or you have a general appreciation for the classics, this is a lovely little collection that really challenges your reflexes, can generate some genuinely thrilling, enjoyable moments, and offers plenty of replayability. I know I’m definitely going to be making a habit of doing the weekly World Championships!

Verdict

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a wonderful celebration of an amazing gaming era. The weekly World Championships are fun to enter, there’s lots of pin options and medals to unlock and there’s a decent playerbase already to test your skills against. One wonders if Nintendo are looking to make this into a larger franchise as I’d love to try a SNES and even N64 Edition because while this was a blast for me, NES games definitely aren’t for everyone in 2024. 

Pros

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Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is out now on Switch

Code Kindly Provided by Nintendo for review purposes