Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, the latest release from Nintendo, is all about mastery. This collection of retro microgames takes 13 classic NES titles and transforms them into bite-sized speedrunning challenges, encouraging players to replay them repeatedly to shave seconds off their best times. The heart of the experience lies in the titular Nintendo World Championships, a weekly tournament where players submit their best times for five specific challenges, vying for a top ranking by Monday morning.
Initially, I was unsure how I’d fare against hundreds of thousands of players in the game’s first week. While I’d been honing my skills during the review period, I lacked confidence in my ability to make a splash in games like Super Mario Bros., where the optimal strategies are already well-documented. To my surprise, I discovered I was much better at Mario than I thought, a testament to the game’s powerful coaching capabilities.
The tournament’s inaugural week presented a series of relatively easy challenges. Players were tasked with obtaining the first mushroom in Super Mario Bros. as quickly as possible, completing a vertical platforming sequence in Metroid, beating a short stretch of Super Mario Bros. 2, and swiftly dispatching bats in The Legend of Zelda. The most demanding challenge, however, involved beating World 1-1 in Super Mario Bros. as fast as possible.
Nintendo World Championships offers players ample time to improve their skills. Each tournament begins on Monday and concludes the following week. During this period, players can repeatedly attempt to set new records and submit their best scores until the tournament ends. While there are no tangible rewards beyond a high position on the weekly leaderboard, there was one prize that sparked my competitive spirit – a profile badge awarded to those who rank within the top 20% of a tournament.
While I effortlessly secured S-ranks in Zelda and Metroid, the Mario games proved more challenging. Despite my fondness for the series, I’ve never been particularly adept at the NES Mario titles. My struggles stemmed from my inability to grasp Mario’s momentum-based sliding mechanics, leading to numerous embarrassing deaths. To conquer the three Mario challenges in the tournament, which demanded pixel-perfect play, I needed to elevate my skills.
The brilliance of Nintendo World Championships lies in its ability to act as a teacher for those seeking mastery. The game’s single-player speedrun mode features a selection of challenges from each of its 13 games, each designed to teach players specific skills essential for mastering the games. For example, within the Super Mario Bros. challenge suite, there’s a minigame that tasks players with simply hopping up a staircase as fast as possible. While this may seem trivial, it’s crucial for achieving an S-rank on the tournament’s World 1-1 challenge.
After revisiting these lessons, I diligently began running World 1-1 repeatedly. Each attempt, I carefully noted where I was losing time. I addressed obvious pain points early on, like mistimed jumps over small staircases that were costing me precious seconds. However, some of my biggest roadblocks were subtle. Early in the level, Mario jumps over a series of spaced-out green pipes of varying heights. While Mario can hop over one set, another is too high to reach from the previous pipe. Every time I attempted this leap, I’d end up bumping into the pipe’s edge and losing momentum. I spent an entire morning solely focused on this maneuver, repeatedly practicing until I pinpointed the exact point I needed to jump down to in order to clear the pipe without losing speed. It might have only saved a second at most, but these small improvements added up.
Gradually, my best times began to decrease. I was blazing through World 1-1 faster than ever before, with minimal errors. After several attempts, I reached what felt like my limit, completing the level in a blistering 21.16 seconds. I had no idea how far off from perfection that was, but I was content enough to submit my score and hope it would secure me a spot in the top 20%.
When I logged in on Monday morning to check my results, my jaw dropped. My final ranking for the minigame was 363 out of 50,637, placing me within the top 0.8% of players. Among players born in 1989, I had achieved ninth place out of 1,728. When I watched a replay of the first-place winner dismantling the level, I realized I was closer to perfection than I initially thought; I was just 0.05 seconds off the first-place time.
While Nintendo World Championships might lack a comprehensive retro package, no game released this year has instilled such a profound sense of accomplishment. It equips players with the tools they need to approach mastering a game like a science, complete with illustrated instruction manuals that break down the nuances and strategies for the most challenging obstacles. Witnessing my best times steadily decrease provides a tangible sense of progress, a clear indication that I’m genuinely improving. It’s a powerful learning tool that’s already yielded visible results. I can now confidently proclaim myself a master of Super Mario Bros. World 1-1.
This accomplishment is a direct consequence of the unique premise of Nintendo World Championships, which continues to keep me engaged against all odds. My journey doesn’t stop here; I’m moving on to World 1-2. Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is available now on Nintendo Switch.
