Nintendo’s NES World Championships game feels like its next multiplayer hit

After an hour of competitive, tense, and often hilarious gameplay with Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, the speed-running classics collection feels like the Switch maker’s next multiplayer hit.

At first glance, you’d be forgiven for thinking that World Championships looks possibly less interesting than Wii U’s NES Remix series, a similar package of retro challenges that also drastically altered gameplay scenarios, like having players control Zelda 2’s Link in Super Mario Bros.

Where Championships differs from Remx is in its laser focus on multiplayer and high score-chasing. The Switch title features over 150 speed-running challenges, with various levels of difficulty, across 13 classic NES titles, including Super Mario Bros., Zelda, Metroid, Donkey Kong and Kirby’s Adventure. These challenges range from simple 5-second dashes to grab Super Mario Bros.’ first mushroom, to expert challenges like beating the entire game without getting hit.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition Video Preview

Championships’ most basic single-player offering is Speedrun Mode. Here, players are challenged with completing many bite-sized challenges across the 13 NES titles, such as grabbing the first items in The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Super Mario Bros. 3 or The Lost Levels.

These sound simple, but getting the first mushroom in Super Mario Bros. in under 4.5 seconds is far more difficult than you might think. Thankfully, everything is designed to make fast replays as easy and painless as possible, with players able to instantly quit a challenge by pressing both triggers, and swiftly reinitiate it with the press of a button.

The default game display has your personal best ghost running side-by-side with live gameplay, encouraging you to race with yourself. Players will be rewarded with a ranking for hitting certain milestones, as well as coins for spending on new player icons and Speedrun challenges, and pins for achieving great feats.

Despite dozens of tries, we were unable to achieve the highest S rank on the first Mario challenge, but thanks to the smart replay screen, it was never frustrating, and improvement always felt within reach.

Quickly, the compulsion to shave tenths-of-a-second off our personal best kicked in, and we had to be ushered by a Nintendo rep to actually try some different areas of the game. This obsession to chase down a higher score is compounded by the number of unlockable icons and pins, which can be attached to your profile for bragging rights in multiplayer modes (as well as, in an incredibly nice touch, your favourite NES or Famicom game from an extensive list of titles).

But as enjoyable as the Speedrun Mode challenges were, they’re ultimately a warmup for World Championships’ main event, which is its multiplayer suite. In these modes, the two gameplay screens of the solo challenges are replaced by up to eight, as players compete in frantic speedruns which often measure success in milliseconds. It’s here where the game transformed from a fairly straightforward (though slickly executed) high score package, into something that felt really unique.

In Party Mode, a group of players can compete simultaneously in either individual challenges or themed packs, based on individual games or style of challenge. One pack, for example, was themed entirely around clearing levels in Super Mario Bros. 3. There are also packs that incorporate multiple games and, thankfully, there’s the option of a practice run to help younger players (and older ones who didn’t quite master Excite Bike) familiarize themselves with the controls.

In packs, players get points depending on their finishing place. If you die or mess up during gameplay, your screen will rewind. There is also the option to give up using both triggers, which will forfeit any points for that round.

With other players, suddenly the extreme simplicity of the easier challenges starts to make sense, as yelps and cheers erupt as competitors beat each other by tenths of a second in the race to grab Metroid’s morph ball, plummet down to a door in Mario Bros. 2, or clear the first stage of Donkey Kong.

Longer challenges proved equally as tense and exciting. In one challenge to beat world 1-1 in Super Mario Bros. 3, mistiming a jump to the final goal box cost us the win. Another pack had us racing to finish the first three levels of Donkey Kong, with players neck-and-neck throughout, and a single slip-up deciding the winner.

For more experienced players, there are one-off Legend challenges. One such challenge we tried in Party Mode was Lost Legend, a super tough Lost Levels Mario level which requires pinpoint jumping, including a section where players need to use a spring to bounce off a flying Koopa and hit a vine block. There was plenty of dying and rewinding here, but nearly everyone made it to the end eventually.

In these tougher challenges, World Championships’ suite of help options comes in handy. Every challenge in the game shows a video preview of how to complete it, but these more complex challenges also have full, magazine-style guides called Classified Information, which show annotated maps with the best route through the level. It’s a great touch and, in combination with the irresistibly 80s soundtrack, adds to the feeling of what it was like playing NES games back in the day.

“In one challenge to beat world 1-1 in Super Mario Bros. 3, mistiming a jump to the final goal box cost us the win. Another pack had us racing to finish the first three levels of Donkey Kong, with a single slip-up deciding the winner.”

For the many of us who can’t often call seven friends over to play video games, World Championships also has weekly online challenges, and an excellent Survival Mode. In Survival, you compete alone against the ghost data of seven other online players across three different challenges.

After each challenge – in our test, pop a balloon in Balloon Fight, defeat a Hammer Bro in Mario Bros 3, or finish a course in Kirby’s Adventure – half of the ‘players’ are eliminated. Just like local multiplayer, winning a round is the result of small margins, with one slip-up usually resulting in crippling defeat or stunning victory.

It remains to be seen if there’s enough content in World Championships to keep players entertained for an extensive period, or indeed if it will spawn a sizable online community, but after our session with the game, it’s absolutely one we’re now looking forward to getting our hands on.