10 years ago Nintendo had a series of games called NES Remix on the WiiU and 3DS. Each game was a collection of snippets of classic first-party NES games with little micro-goals, like they took 9-Volt’s levels from WarioWare and turned them into a game. The incredibly unwieldedly titled Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is literally just the fourth NES Remix game, they just decided to give it a terrible name and hope nobody would notice.

It’s the same structure: complete challenges to get coins, use coins to unlock more challenges, repeat, but now the focus is entirely on clear time. The challenges are largely the same as previous installments “get 30 coins in SMB as fast as possible” or “climb this set of platforms in Metroid” or “idk man try to do literally anything in Ice Climbers this game is horrible”, but while previous games primarily scored you based on how many lives it took and then considered time, NWC:NE is all about “ok you got the mushroom in 5.03s, now get in your Gamer Stance and do it faster to get that sweet S-Rank”.

The game selection is inexplicably fewer than any of the three previous entries, but they stuck to the Hits (and also Ice Climbers). The challenges themselves are a bit more in-depth than those from NES Remix too. Like sure, NWC:NE has its share of super trivial “challenges” like “Get the Wooden Sword from the Old Man”, but the singular focus on timing makes chasing S-Ranks for even these “Easy” levels challenging.

In addition to the base single player mode where you race against yourself, there’s also a replay-based “multiplayer” challenge mode, where you play in 8/4/2-player match-ups against other players’ recordings in an elimination style tournament. There’s also a weekly rotator of like 5 focused challenges you can “compete” in with an online leaderboard. And if – somehow – you can somehow find 8 players in meatspace, you can play a local live version of the otherwise async multiplayer mode.

It’s fine, but I have a couple notes:

  1. Needs a one-button reset. You can’t “die”, it just rewinds a bit and you lose time. It has a hard reset, but it’s ZL/ZR and then hit A and then wait for the countdown. I want a one-button reset, because I’m resetting a LOT.
  2. Just tell me the threshold for the next highest rank. As it stands, you just have to blindly keep grinding until you get a new rank. You have no way to know that you were 0.01s away from an S-Rank. That sucks, just tell me. You don’t even need to tell me the full set, just the next rank. Then I can make the determination as to if I think that’s something I can realistically do.
  3. Online Leaderboards and Replays. I know you’re storing everyones inputs centrally, because that’s how the “multiplayer” mode works. Let me browse it. Hell, highlight a series of amazing times people have set every week. I want to be able to see the insane things people do in this game.
  4. MAKE ALL THE PINS. SELL ALL THE PINS. I WILL BUY ALL OF THE PINS.

So, in short, make the game more like Neon White. But only in the good ways, don’t make a cringey visual novel about Neon Pink (Kirby) fighting his way through the afterlife.

One Fun Aside:

This game is notable for being the first time in my life that I have viscerally experienced The Frame Rule in Super Mario Bros. The Frame Rule is a quirk of how SMB works where levels are only “allowed” to end every set number of frames, and if you miss that window you just have to wait and look at the castle until The Bus leaves for the next level. This is notable because it means the speed run can only be improved by that number of frames at a time.

I’ve heard about this for years, and know I’ve experienced it, but I’ve never seen it until I was doing a “collect 30 coins” level, which spans 1-1 and 1-2. The game shows your best run split-screen with your current “live” run, so I was able to sit there and watch a run where I maybe collected one fewer coin but “caught” the frame rule, and then in my live run I got one more coin but missed the frame rule, and had to sit there and WAIT while the two runs caught up with each other. Neat.

I can pretty safely recommend this game if you remotely enjoy NES games and/or are speedrun-pilled. Just don’t expect anything amazing if you already experienced any of the NES Remix games.