Between WarioWare, NES Remix, and Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition, Nintendo has a real thing for slicing its games to pieces. Small pieces, quite often. When it comes to the Nintendo World Championship, the clunky name is the longest thing about it. For the rest of the game it’s, what, 10 seconds, 50 per tap? This is Nintendo making TikTok, Nintendo in the editing suite. And that’s adorable.
The Nintendo World Cup is all about speed running. The game takes 13 old Nintendo classics and chops them up to form around 150 one-off challenges. So Super Mario Bros, for example, has a challenge to get a mushroom, a challenge to collect all the coins in an underground section, a challenge to win 1-1 as fast as possible. Ice Climber has challenges to reach certain floors. The original Legend of Zelda has challenges to enter this cave and grab the sword and challenges to defeat enemies as quickly as possible. Metroid…
Two things are obvious. First, I think shorter challenges are the best. Maybe it’s because of all those years of playing WarioWare, but when the Nintendo World Championship gives you something that’s going to take 30 seconds—say a Metroid aisle jump challenge—my attention starts to drift. It’s not that I can’t handle 30 seconds of doing one thing – my ability to focus hasn’t atrophied that much yet – it’s more that the game prepares me for very fast things, so when I’m asked to do moderately fast things, everything drags on.
Second, there aren’t that many teams that have a back catalog as well-suited to this as Nintendo. With games exclusively from the 8-bit era, the Nintendo World Championship lives in a world of playful immediacy. Seeing a Mario screen means knowing what to do. Same for Zelda, Metroid, ExciteBike. You can see the whole world, not just a part of it, in first person. You don’t have to worry about camera controls or dual sticks. God, my life was simple. Of course, Sony could do something similar – ten seconds to break someone’s ankle with a hammer in The Last of Us, GO! – and it would be fascinating, but there would be a cognitive snort at the start of it all that was completely absent from the NES games.
Even as I write this, I wonder if I’m completely right. These games seem more immediate to me, but I’m very old by this point. Would they be as immediate to my ten-year-old, or would the cognitive snort occur just because her games no longer looked like this? I’d ask, but it’s her last week of school and she’s rehearsing for the play. Another time!
I think the Nintendo World Championship breaks down into four main elements. There is a single player mode where you just go through the challenges and try to get good times for them. Then there’s a mode where you set times in specific challenges and wait to see how you fare against the rest of the world when the results are announced. Then there’s a mode that puts you in a bunch of challenges where you compete against other players’ ghost data and try not to get eliminated. Then there’s party mode.
It’s probably padding coming at the end of the console’s life, but it’s hard to get too grumpy about it when they’re both as well-packaged as an 80s US game show that would air in the middle of the night on Friday in the 90s and so idiosyncratic. And the thought of Sony or Microsoft doing the same is ridiculous. I’d like to see that, but what I’d really like to see is some sort of indie games all-star take on this. Make a river in Dorfromantic! Kill a Shopkeeper in Spelunky! Onward! Out! Faster and faster!
