Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition Review: “A Speedrunners Paradise”

Recently, Nintendo has made significant strides in making some of its retro titles readily available to today's players, and is no exception. For those who may not recall, or were not yet born, the NES-centered Nintendo World Championships first occurred in 1990. This momentous event brought players together from all over and required its participants to compete in different challenges on the NES using a special Championship cartridge that contained customized minigames from some of Nintendo’s popular titles, like the Super Mario Bros. series.

Since these Championship cartridges are now some of the rarest and most valuable in the world, most of us will never have the luxury of experiencing what the participants in 1990 were able to. However, with the release of the, Nintendo is giving players the chance to get as close to the experience as possible by allowing them to compete in several minigame challenges from popular NES games. Not only can players strive to beat their records, but they can also challenge their friends in local multiplayer or even attempt to make it to the top of the worldwide leaderboard.

Speedrunning as a concept is often mixed among players with some feeling as though they don’t have the skill for it, while others have built an entire legacy showcasing ways to shortcut games. Thankfully, does a wonderful job at making speedrunning fun for everyone. Since the full NES games are not available within this game, all the games are divided into minigame challenges of varying intensity, making this a speedrunners' paradise. As players earn coins by completing these challenges, they can then use those coins to unlock more challenges, and since the difficulty increases gradually, new players have plenty of time to get used to the controls.

Even after reaching some of the legendary challenges where well-known shortcuts from each game are utilized, uses displayed pointers as well as pre-game demonstrations to ensure nobody has the chance to miss it.