4Gamers – Review | Nintendo World Championship: NES Version Scores Mainly Through Local Co-op Play

The Olympic Games begin again this week. Athletes from around the world compete in ancient sports. Don’t miss out on the Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition as the virtual version of the Olympic Games. Speedrunners get to see who is the fastest and best at completing challenges in NES games. This isn’t the first time Nintendo has launched such a competition. The Nintendo World Championships have been held since 1990, and the grand prize is often tens of thousands of dollars. In this latest edition, you’re fighting for honor and conscience. We’ve already made a bid for a spot on the podium.

Speedrunners are extremely popular online. There are entire Twitch channels dedicated to the art of completing a game in the fastest time possible. The pace of play can be daunting at times and can be a turn-off for newcomers. Fortunately, Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition ensures that speedrunning remains an enjoyable experience for players of all levels. You don’t have to play entire games to achieve something. All of the NES games available are divided into bite-sized challenges of varying difficulty. By completing these, you earn coins, which you can use to unlock more difficult challenges. The difficulty gradually increases, giving you plenty of time to practice all the elements of the game.

Many of these older games have shortcuts to complete levels faster. You don’t have to look for these shortcuts online because Nintendo World Championship simply explains how to achieve the optimal time. Thus, newcomers are given every opportunity to perform the same tricks that experienced speedrunners do. Of course, achieving a high score is still a big challenge, but these types of helpful tips make anything possible with a little practice.

Anyone who has a Nintendo Switch Online and has experience with virtual consoles knows that these older games often feature a rewind function. In this game, it’s also possible to rewind time if you make a wrong jump or don’t react quickly enough to an incoming Goomba. Unfortunately, you can’t choose how far you want to rewind, and this can be frustrating. Sometimes, the game will rewind mid-jump, causing you to crash immediately again. In this case, you’ll have to start the entire challenge over again. Obviously, this doesn’t happen every time, but the rewind function could have been designed more intelligently to avoid this kind of thing.

In total, there are thirteen different games and over 150 challenges in this collection. With titles like Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, and Metroid, we can really talk about a successful collection. However, we would have liked to see more variety in the titles. There are two Zelda games and four Mario games. It would have been better if the thirteen games were made up of completely different franchises. Now there are quite a few repetitive challenges because the gameplay is so similar. Games like Castlevania, Tetris, or Punch-Out!!! provided a nice variety.

One of the highlights is the local co-op mode. Up to eight players can work on the same screen at the same time. You can enter themed tournaments where three to five matches follow each other and everyone is awarded a number of points at the end. Finally, you can decide who is the best NES player in your group of friends. These tournaments start quickly, are easy to control so everyone can participate and are quickly over. These are three very important pillars that keep local play fun for large groups. Perfect for organizing Nintendo living room tournaments.