Nintendo is good at chopping up games into bits and pieces, whether it’s WarioWare, NES Remix, or Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition. They chop up bits and pieces, quite often. When it comes to Nintendo World Championship, the unwieldy name is definitely the longest one. The rest of the game is, what, 10 seconds, 50 seconds at most. This is Nintendo doing TikTok, Nintendo in the editing room. And it’s fascinating.
Nintendo World Championship is all about speed running. The game takes 13 classic Nintendo games from the past and breaks them down into around 150 one-shot challenges. For example, Super Mario Bros. has a challenge to get mushrooms, collect all the coins in an underground section, and complete 1-1 as fast as possible. Ice Climbers has a challenge to reach a specific floor. The original Legend of Zelda has a challenge to go into a cave and grab a sword, and defeat enemies as fast as possible. Metroid…
Two things are obvious. First, I think the short challenges are by far the best. Maybe it’s because I’ve played WarioWare for years, but when the Nintendo World Championship gives me something that takes 30 seconds (like the challenge to jump through a Metroid hallway), my attention span is scattered. It’s not that I can’t do one thing for 30 seconds; my concentration hasn’t waned that much yet. If anything, the game pushes me to do things very quickly, so when it asks me to be moderately quick, it all feels sluggish.
Second, not many companies have a back catalogue as well suited to this game as Nintendo. The Nintendo World Championship, which only plays games from the 8-bit era, lives in a world of playful immediacy. You look at Mario’s screen and you know what to do. So do Zelda, Metroid, and Excitebike. You see the whole world, not just a slice of it in first person. You don’t have to worry about camera controls or twin sticks. Ah, my life used to be simple. Sure, Sony can do this stuff — 10 seconds to break someone’s ankle with a hammer in The Last of Us, GO! — and it’s fascinating, but the beginning of it all has a cognitive jolt that NES games just don’t have.
As I write this, I wonder if I’m entirely right. These games seem more direct to me, but I’m pretty old at this point. Will it be just as direct for my 10 year old, or will there be some cognitive confusion just because her games are no longer in this form? I do ask, since it’s her last week of school and she’s in rehearsals for a play. Until next time!
I think the Nintendo World Championship is split into four main elements: There’s a single player mode, where you play challenges and try to get a good time. Then there’s a mode where you set a time on a particular challenge and then when the results are announced, see how you do against players from around the world. Then there’s a mode where you compete against other players’ ghost data in a series of challenges to try and not get eliminated. And then there’s the party mode.
It’s probably filler that comes at the end of the console’s lifespan, but it’s so nicely packaged and so unique, like an ’80s American game show that would have aired on Friday midnight in the ’90s, that it’s hard to complain too much about it. It’d be funny to see Sony or Microsoft do the same thing. I’d love to see that, but what I’d really like to see is an all-star cast of indie games working on this. Build a river with Dorfromantik! Kill the shopkeeper with Spelunky! Forward! Outward! Faster and faster!