Nintendo World Championships NES Edition Review (2024)

Bite-sized fun... for a bite-sized time.

I’m old enough to remember hours and hours of entertainment provided by my family’s NES console. We never had a R.O.B. or a Power Glove — but my friend Chris had both, and the only thing I remember about them both is that neither lasted very long — but we did have a light gun and played the combo of Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt on a seemingly everlasting loop.

I also remember riding my bike about 15 minutes down the road to the Confederation Mall Blockbuster so I could take part honest to goodness NES Championship matches. Or, rather, trials. Which I never got very far in; The Wizard I was not.

Regardless, it’s that feeling of competition that Nintendo World Championships NES Edition is going for, providing a series of speed-running time trials to solo players, to groups of local players, or opened wide up to online leaderboards (providing you’ve got a Nintendo Switch Online account).

I started with single-player action as most of the review period took place while online functionality was offline. Here, you’ll start with a small supply of in-game coins, slowly working your way through challenges tied to NES classics including Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2, Super Mario Bros. 3, Excitebike, The Legend of Zelda, and so many more.

Challenges range from 5-6 seconds long (grab the first mushroom in Super Mario Bros.‘ Level 1-1), to minutes long (complete all of Super Mario Bros.‘ Level 1-1). An initial screen will show you exactly how the challenge can be completed, and some challenges will even feature on-screen arrows to help you succeed (in the case of reaching Zelda‘s first dungeon).

The best possible ranking available for a perfect completion is an S, which grants you the most coins to then use to unlock new challenges. You’ll also receive coins for besting your own records and the like.

In terms of single-player action, that’s about it… as too it is for Party Mode, which is that gameplay expanded to groups of up to 8. For the purposes of review, I grabbed my husband and challenged him to a series of small tournaments, grouping challenges by game or by theme.

My husband went through five such tournaments — maybe taking a half an hour at most — before declaring he’d had enough.

“Is there more to this?” he asked after we traded tournament wins pretty much back and forth (and I note that he asked after essentially beating me 3-2).

Truthfully, there isn’t. He enjoyed the Mario 3 mini-boss tournament but made me redo a challenge involving Excitebike as he’d never played it. Where I had the benefit of a lot of nostalgia to keep me playing (though admittedly I was reaching my limit too), he did not.

This is the important bit to get about NES Edition. This isn’t the thrill of biking over to Blockbuster to play a section of a game controlled and timed by a junior staffer, it’s a bite-sized portion of a game carefully programmed and curated by Nintendo. Think you could do better in a run? It’s not a matter of practicing for next year, it’s just literally practicing in-game and producing immediate results. That’ll work for a lot of people, but it takes the magic out of things for me.

Truthfully, Nintendo World Championships NES Edition made me more nostalgic for the actual games found within — Super Mario Bros. 3 and The Legend of Zelda specifically — and the need for a Nintendo Switch Online subscription to properly play meant I could go and actually play those games through emulation. I don’t know if that’s fully a win or not.

Ultimately, I’d imagine most players will likely get about an hour’s worth of satisfaction from Nintendo World Championships NES Edition before finding themselves exhausted, though parties with a bunch of players will help sustain that feeling. Players who are utterly focused on besting their own scores — or those of others online — will likely spend far more time with things. It’s ultimately up to you if that offering is worth its $50 AUD asking price.

Nintendo World Championships NES Edition was reviewed using a promotional code on Nintendo Switch, as provided by the publisher. Click here to learn more about Stevivor’s scoring scale.