Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition review

It didn’t take long playing Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition to quickly become not only addicted, but also fiercely competitive with just about everyone who picked up a controller.

If you are a child of the 80s, then this minigame, speed-run fest will evoke feelings of deep, warm nostalgia and unlock hitherto unknown feats of muscle memory that have laid dormant for aeons within your body. It features a sublimely curated selection of over 150 microgames spread over 13 classic Nintendo Entertainment System titles, in a format that allows both on or offline asynchronous multiplayer, in a pleasingly brisk format that makes it the unexpected party game hit of the Summer.

The action kicks off by asking you to select an avatar – pulled from a beefy choice of instantly recognisable Nintendo sprites and icons, plus selecting your own favourite NES/Famicom game from a surprisingly huge list of both Western and Japanese fare. Think of how you set up your profile when you first venture into a modern Street Fighter game and you will know what I mean. You then get the chance to play through a multitude of challenges pulled from the first three canon Mario titles, the almost cruelly difficult Lost Levels, the chalk-and-cheese brace of 8-bit Zelda games, and standalone titles like Balloon Fight, Kid Icarus, Ice Climber, Kirby’s Adventure, Excitebike, Donkey Kong, and of course Metroid.

New challenges are unlocked by simply beating stages and using the rewarded in-game currency of gold coins to purchase them, and as you would expect they straddle a difficulty curve that ranges from extremely short and simplistic such as: enter cave, nab the Master Sword, to lengthy and much more taxing, like “complete a whole level from a specific title”.

You can play on your own, of course, but the best of Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is experienced via the multiplayer. The screen can split itself down into a multitude of segments for an elimination mode where only the top few players avoid being eliminated until only one remains. This matches you against ghosts from around the world, and while the silver edition is pretty easy, winning out at the gold one will require A++ or S ranks on pretty much every challenge. There is also a Party Mode where your speed and overall placement awards points just like the podium on Mario Kart, with the player gaining the highest score over five pre-selected challenges being the champ. You can compete against the ghosts of challenges past as you try and beat yourself, essentially. There are online tournaments and rotating challenges, too, where you can try to beat the cream of the crop, too.

The Nintendo commitment to inclusivity is commendable here. Whilst old players like me have been playing these games for over 30 years, there are going to be whole generations who have never Morph Balled Samus, or worn a Tanooki suit. The pre-challenge guides tell you which buttons to press, and the extreme difficulty challenges come with lovingly constructed illustrations and maps that inform the player what they need to do to best beat some of the more lengthy sorties. These hints and tips even help the long in the tooth old schoolers like me, too – this old dog definitely learned a few new tricks along the way. But it really is bizarre just how some of the memories and techniques come flooding back. I blew my own mind just how accurate I was when I instantly S-ranked a stage consisting of a Mario Bros 3 segment of leaping up a hill and then collecting a Super Leaf. The need to achieve new personal bests quickly becomes a worrying obsession, one which can be a combination of fun and frustration.

The main critique of the package is that there are a couple of games that, whilst rightly considered important in the Nintendo pantheon, just do not stand up well to modern play due to the controls, physics, and inertia which make them frustrating to play and can easily derail a otherwise great attempt at winning a party runthrough. The worst offenders are undoubtedly Ice Climber and Donkey Kong. I have never been fond of the former, with its strange, inconsistent jumps and unforgiving gameplay, whilst the oddly precise ladder climbing of the substandard Kong arcade port is also an annoying lowlight. I can’t criticise Kirby too much – after all the cute pink spherical guy has been good to me over the years – but good lord, the NES game is far more tricky than I remember – especially with the virtual gun-to-the-head of having to blast through it in inhumanly quick times, potentially against other actual humans in the room.

Despite these couple of ancient clangers, the fact is that the thick end of this package is a wonderful selection of genuinely brilliant games that lend themselves beautifully to the format thanks to their tight, timeless design and compulsive gameplay. As you would expect from Nintendo, the presentation is utterly top-drawer, with an approach that is both reverential to the past but looking forward to enticing a whole new slew of fans.

There is, surely, scope for some additional games to be added in the future, too. I can easily think of a dozen more games that would slot seamlessly right into this one and feel instantly at home; not least of which is Punch Out.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is one of the best multiplayer party games to be released this year, and at a terrific budget price point, deserves to take pride of place in your collection. Not since the heyday of the Wii has there been a better excuse to bust out a game at a family gathering. Even on my own, it gets me excited and in full nostalgia mode, which is a pure and simple win.