Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a very odd little title. As a way to repackage and again resell older games, Nintendo has packed snippets of 13 of them into a single piece of software with the set dressing and explanation that this isn’t just a compilation, but an at-home version of the actual tournament that was started in 1990.

In practice what this means is that the baker’s dozen of games are not presented in their entirety, but they are instead split into challenges. The marketing for the game states that there are more than 150 of these inside but, but don’t let that number fool you.

A massive focus on these challenges is speed: Nintendo outright uses the term “speedrunning” inside of the game and fighting for the best time to complete these challenges is the entire point.

To do this an in-game coin currency is used. The first challenge of each game is free but, to unlock more, you need to pay some coins. Your performance in the challenges determines how many coins you get in return and, if you turn enough of a profit, you can unlock the rest of the challenges and buy profile icons to represent you.

While we know some people like to play these types of games with everything unlocked from the beginning, this system is a smart way to ease players in regardless of their skill or familiarity with the subject matter.

Once a challenge is complete to any degree, players can choose to stay on them to get better times or move on to the next. Moving on with poor performances just means fewer coins and slower unlocks, which is a godsend when you hit a wall and just can’t nail some difficult or super-fast challenges.

And we do mean fast. Just like actual speedrunning, every millisecond counts and some of the faster challenges feel like they require frame-perfect inputs to get the best times. A rating system for challenge difficulty also gives you an idea of what you’re getting into even if we don’t always agree with how things are categorised, though this may be our own personal experiences.

For example: many of the harder challenges in Excitebike weren’t tough at all, but we played a lot of that game in years past. On the other hand, even the easier challenges in Ice Climber gave us issues, as we hadn’t given that title much time in the past.

Here we wish that the actual full versions of the games were included with this title. Aside from giving more value to the high asking price of this game, it would also give a kind of “free play” way to experience the original software.

Our only other complaint is that some challenges are just too simple, like “beat this level” or “collect some coins”. They seem like filler content compared to other challenges which have you finding secrets in games or navigating a particularly difficult passage.

When we got tired of perfecting times on our own, we could thankfully bring others into the mix.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition has a Party Mode where a whopping eight people can all play locally at the same time. If you’re sweating about the amount of controllers you’d need to do that, each player can get by with a single Joy-Con, which makes it an easier prospect.

Inside of Party Mode, the group can choose from themed challenge packs or play one challenge at a time. There are 33 of these packs by our count with each differing in the estimated time to complete, the number of challenges inside of the pack and the difficulty of the pack as a whole.

While this sounds like a lot we have to mention that challenges are repeated across the packs and you will quickly see the same challenges over and over again if you’re playing for a decent amount of time. On top of that, you will need to cycle packs quite often given their short length of just four minutes for the quickest pack and 20 minutes for the longest. This is definitely not a party game like Mario Party where you can lock settings in and actually, you know, have an experience for around 45 minutes.

As an alternative to packs, the party can outright play each challenge one by one. It’s much less engrossing this way and you spend even more time in menus, but it’s an option. This way to play is also good for a group that either has a particular fondness for a smaller pool of games, or a particular dislike for others.

We were very much left disappointed by Party Mode. You can maybe, maybe squeeze out an hour of fun maximum with any group of people but we’d be willing to bet that after 30 minutes most of the group would be asking to play something else.

Better curation of the packs, extra gameplay for the party (like moving through a board), a way to mess with opponents or really anything else would have gone a long way.

This feeling of being barebones and missing easy opportunities became the prevailing theme of Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition. We really bought into the idea of cutting up and rearranging NES classics for a modern audience with a focus on speed, skill and bite-sized experiences which have become the norm in the age of TikTok. And yes you can call me a boomer for even making that statement, but it’s true: a large population of gamers both old and young have a desire for experiences like this and Nintendo had a chance to capitalize on that, but failed.

We wanted more challenges with wacky clear requirements, we wanted a much more expanded Party Mode that we could get excited about when friends were over, and we wanted to see these classic titles used as a vehicle to grab new audiences that weren’t alive when they released, but it feels like we only got a promise of that.

Lastly, for online play, there’s World Championship Mode with rotating leaderboards in five challenges and Survival Mode where players’ ghosts are eliminated based on completion times. Survival Mode gave us flashbacks to Super Mario Bros. 35 only, you know, not as good as that.

With some smaller items, we didn’t mention – like helpful “secret” informational routing for the most difficult challenges and noticeable slowdown in certain games – also considered, Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition ends up being a difficult recommend.

It has some fun ideas and it can represent a great way to try a nerfed version of speedrunning for those who have always wanted to try it. NES fans who have played these games for decades may get a kick out of this new coat of paint too, but the rest will be left feeling that there should have been more meat on the bones, a lot more meat considering the price of $30 in the US and R529 in South Africa.

Hopefully, these ideas can be taken and expanded upon in something like an SNES version of the title.

FINAL SCORE: 5 OUT OF 10.