Nintendo World Championship Analysis: NES Edition – My First Speedrun
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a good introduction to speedrunning that would make for a party game with a similar focus to NES Remix.
My two favorite weeks of the year coincide with the celebration of two charity events dedicated to speedrunning: Games Done Quick and its summer counterpart. These events bring together fans of playing games at full speed (with glitches, with bizarre controls, or even with a dog at the controls) and manage to spread their enthusiasm through the passion of the runners themselves and the commentators explaining what is happening on screen, which is not always self-evident.
Many of them try to answer the question “what is the perfect game to start learning speedrunning?” and this answer becomes easier every year with the release of games in which speedrunning is an integrated mechanic in the game, such as Neon White, Anger Foot or the future I Am Your Beast. Speedrun is experiencing a perfect moment, and perhaps there is no better proof of this than the game, the summer version from Nintendo, which invites us to play its classic games at full speed.
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a collection of time trials based on original NES games like Metroid, The Legend of Zelda, and Super Mario Bros. The trials vary greatly in length and difficulty: popping a balloon in Balloon Fight will take us less than two seconds, while Super Mario Bros. starts with a 1-1 score and takes closer to 10 minutes to finish the game.
The game is the successor to the NES Remix saga for Wii U and 3DS; some of the NES Remix challenges were already time-based, although this game had more variety; Sometimes we were asked to complete parts of the game without dying or with a character from another adventure. These types of remixes are missing to add extravagance and variety to the proposal, although in return we get a game in which every decision is aimed at helping us improve as sprinters.
The main single mode is Speedrun, which offers us 150 challenges from 13 different video games, although their distribution is not quite equal; Ice Climber or Excitebike have barely half a dozen challenges, while Super Mario Bros. 3 easily overcomes 20 unique challenges. Each challenge includes a series of tools that can help us: before entering, we can watch a video to understand what the goal is and what we are going to find; once we create a game, we can simultaneously watch a replay of our best time while playing or directly. We can put our replay on full screen and pause it frame by frame checking which buttons we press at each moment.
The challenges cover almost everything you would expect from an NES game: we will have to overcome rooms (get a tanuki suit in SMB3, destroy eggplant sorcerers in Kid Icarus), defeat final bosses (Ridley in Metroid, Aquamentus in Zelda) or directly go through famous phases (1-1 SMB or Kirby’s Adventure). NWC knows how to scale the length and difficulty of the challenges, from picking up a sword in Zelda or finding vegetables in Super Mario Bros. 2 to vigorously raising the bar.
Special mention should be made of the legendary difficulty challenges, where we have to complete longer missions. The Nintendo World Championships gradually prepare us for these challenges by introducing some segments in other previous stages. For example, the Zelda 2 challenge asks us to learn how to eliminate the same boss that awaits us at the end of the dungeon, which we must overcome in the legendary challenge. Some of these challenges last not seconds, but minutes, but fortunately the game offers us a strategy guide with small tricks, visually distinguished by a layout reminiscent of magazines from the early 90s. The most extreme challenge in the game. asks us to complete all the legendary challenges in a row; you will have to set aside almost an hour to accomplish this feat.
To get to this point, we will have to dedicate half a dozen hours to the game, since initially we will have almost no challenges unlocked; They are opened by getting coins for reaching certain ranks or improving our times. At first, this is not very annoying, since participation practically guarantees us the opening of a new challenge, but towards the end it becomes a bit tedious; Opening the Legend challenge costs 300 coins, and the maximum we get for getting an S in the Ace challenge is 60, so more than once we will have to farm the final bosses of Super Mario Bros. 3 to move on.
Perhaps this should be an incentive for us to repeat phases, but the truth is that the game already has plenty of incentives to allow us to play through phases over and over again. The challenges themselves are rich enough to challenge us to improve our grades and try to get an A… at least in the games we like (sorry, Ice Climber). Speaking of results, the Nintendo World Championship could be a little clearer here, since it doesn’t specify the boundaries between ranks and has too many subcategories. I don’t know if it makes sense that there are A+ and A++ between S and A, since the three A types have the same monetary reward, but in some cases there are noticeable differences in time between one and another.
The key to the success of the Nintendo World Championship when it comes to running a speedrun and inviting us to repeat stages is the use of NES games rather than games from later generations. These are simple games, but not easy; in most cases, we don’t need to use more than the D-Pad and two buttons (I think “Start” is only used in Zelda 2), so the complexity is not added by controls that can be learned almost immediately, but in the mechanics and timing, this is where the complexity is added. Mario’s jumps in Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels are intuitive; mastering the wind jumps takes practice. Learning the precise rhythms of each level, competing with our ghost and shaving tenths of a second off the time is the main attraction of the game; there was no need to force us to farm coins to unlock new stages.
Beyond the individual results, comes the most interesting aspect of the game: the multiplayer mode, both online and local. At the online level, we have two main modes: the Survival Championship and the World Championship. The first one offers us to meet the ghosts of several online players in three challenges known to us in advance (but presented in random order) in the form of exceptions, starting with 8 players and ending with 1 winner. Considering that only the first victory of each week counts, this mode does not add much life to the game, although it allows you to focus on other people’s strategies … and this is not bad at all, because its tasks are very difficult. used in conjunction with another online mode.
The World Championship is more interesting: NWC selects five challenges for each player and lets us repeat them as many times as we want to improve our times. Online classifications are launched at the end of the week, although during the review period we could only set times; the first classification will arrive in a few days. Focusing on just five challenges makes it easier to concentrate on improving your times, which are saved for Speedrun mode if we improve our times. It’s fun to check out Survival from time to time to find new strategies, as better times often come from ignoring the game’s instructions.
At the local level (appropriately called “Fiesta”), the proposal allows us to choose the challenges we want to compete in, or, much more fun, to choose several challenges in a row that share some idea: challenges for beginners, different final bosses, getting upgrades for Samus, using bombs in different games… I don’t understand why this choice is not integrated into the individual mode, because these challenges seem to me one of the best ways to enjoy the game; tests with the same thematic thread that allow us to switch between games to test our versatility.
In local multiplayer, I missed some of the NES Remix’s features. Minigames that involved characters jumping from one universe to another (such as Link, with his inability to jump, when faced with Donkey Kong levels) would have added a bit more intensity to games that, while fun, could have had a limited run in the party aspect.
As a speedrunning fan, I loved every minute of the experience, but I think it might be a bit of a letdown for the general public. At the time of writing, we don’t know if there are plans to release more challenges for the local modes, although we do know that the online multiplayer will feature weekly challenges. All of the Speedrun content can be unlocked in a single weekend, but if the company decides to support the game, there’s still plenty of potential for new challenges in many NES games. The Legend of Zelda doesn’t even have a Ganon fight!
As someone who knows the speedrunning scene, I also wonder if there will be room for elements that are outside the control of the Japanese company, such as glitches. For example, the most effective strategy for speedrunning Super Mario Bros. is, in addition to jumping backwards multiple times, crossing a couple of walls and pipes. Will such results be accepted in the NWC? I guess we’ll find out in a few days, but what caught my attention is that the game is already trying to “cover” several faster routes in SMB 1-1 by indicating that “you can’t go here.”
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a friendly introduction to speedrunning that takes advantage of the Japanese company’s past work and offers all sorts of time trials. By focusing on a single task, this game has more adequate tools than NES Remix to help us improve our times, but it also loses that point of irreverence that could be particularly well suited to multiplayer modes.