Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition Reviews
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition lets you re-experience the classics in challenges that test your speedrunning skills. With quick mini-games that are easy to dive into, there's something for casual players and aspiring speedrunners. However, this game won't let you re-experience the classics in their glory; it's all about speedrunning. If you aren't into practicing well into the night to shave milliseconds off your record, the appeal quickly dwindles.
Despite having little interest in the reveal, having spent over a week on Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, I am now a convert and feel more connected to the past of Nintendo than I have in years. With a crisp and vibrant package that is a blast from the past, Nintendo continues to produce and deliver the best way to engage with the publisher's history.
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition has a lot to love, and it would be great to see a similar treatment for SNES and N64 in the future.
I can't say I didn't have fun with Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition. Far from it. This collection just goes to show how timeless these classic NES games were. However, they're still just relics of a bygone era, and this collection doesn't bring anything new or extra to the table to justify such a hefty price tag.
Review in Slovak | Read full review
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition offers a pleasingly brisk and enjoyable format that makes it the unexpected party game hit of the Summer.
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition doesn't make a great first impression. It's a downgrade in many ways to NES Remix and there's not as much variety or effort put into the challenges, nor any graphical tweaks to speak of this time around. However, stick with it, get into the competitive mindset, and start collecting up all the pins, icons, and top-ranked times on offer, and you may find yourself fully entertained. It's a slight thing, purely speed-focused, but we expect that'll suit plenty of folk who want a competitive outlet to display their old-school skills. And hey, it also doubles as a handy history of some iconic Nintendo gaming moments and mechanics.
For retro enthusiasts with access to likeminded friends and family, this Switch challenge collection is a genuine local multiplayer hit. For solo players and those looking to compete with others online, however, it’s a far less impressive package.
As an approachable, bite-sized introduction to the world of speedrunning through the lens of some bonafide classics, Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a decent enough package. It lacks a little added flavour, but the way it gently teaches you to find those perfect lines, hidden quirks and cheesy hacks makes for some very rewarding moments, and it doubles as a surprisingly good party game.
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition perfectly translates the simple gameplay of the 8-bit era into a competitive-focused release that adds a fresh spin on retro titles. The UI is well designed making it quick and easy to replay challenges, incentivizing you to improve on your last attempt. Each game remains in its original format and due to this, newcomers may struggle to get to grips with the more rigid movement of certain games. With a wealth of online options on its way and chaotic multiplayer, this could be a standout title for retro enthusiasts and become a staple in the speedrunning community.
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a love letter to all fans who grew up with the 8-bit console, but it's not a game suited for every player.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition delivers a very nostalgic challenge. If you have the option to play against other players in local multiplayer with up to eight participants, you can have many hours of fun. If you're close to pro level, that's additionally the case in the two asynchronous challenge modes Survival and World Championship. But if you play solo (not being a pro) after maybe five hours you've seen anything the game has to offer.
Review in German | Read full review
If you loved NES Remix, you will also appreciate Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, which, in addition to several new challenges, offers a small essay on game design. Otherwise, the package is a bit pricey (€29.99, to which you have to add the cost of a Nintendo Switch Online subscription to enjoy all the features), and not all "remixed games" have aged well in the same way.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a great collection of challenges from NES classics. The way everything is presented, results on a super fun videogame that everyone can enjoy.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
All in all, Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition is a fantastic way to discover or reminisce over the titles that formed the basis for many of the franchises that still dominate gaming today. The compulsion to get better and better is perhaps the purest distillation of video gaming available and the more competitive modes offer a challenge for a long time to come. Any Nintendo fan (or gaming fan in general) should pick this up and take on the clock. I look forward to seeing you all on the World Championship leaderboards!
While I’ll surely continue to chip away at my best times, Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition feels more like practice than the big game itself. It’s a great way to learn the basics of speedrunning, but the outlet for those acquired skills is in another castle. Maybe it’s all building toward the return of the real Nintendo World Championships. If that’s the case, cue the ’80s training montage music. I’m going big time.
Nintendo World Championships is a fun introduction to competitive speedrunning with tons of nostalgia, even if its customization tools could be more robust.
A tribute to the timelessness of some of Nintendo's earliest classics and while the whole package is rather thin it's impressive how entertaining it still manages to be.
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition for the Switch valiantly tries to evoke the speedrunning spirit of Nintendo's real-world, 1990 competition, but the challenges are too flimsy for a 2024 release.
To sum up, I do find Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition to be a fun distraction and a half-decent party game. Local multiplayer is obviously more exciting than playing alone but joining the weekly championships is fun too. The weekly challenges are engaging as is the Survival Mode. I just wish it included Red Racer too, or at the very least Tetris. If the game entices you purely for the NES nostalgia then you're golden, but if you are looking for a recreation of the 1990 championships then this isn't the title for you.
Consequently, Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition feels like a release schedule filler. While the multiplayer features are robust, they’re hardly innovative, and really it’s just a package of sliced-up classic games with a timer attached to them. I’d never call a game development project “lazy,” because they’re not, but the minimum work has gone into this, and while it will become a competitive obsession for a small minority, there could have been so much more done to draw in a much broader audience and really celebrate the deep heritage of these games (as well as Nintendo in facilitating competitive play).