God, Nintendo World Cup: NES Edition it’s so frustrating. I am this close to loving this assortment of timed challenges from NES games. In many ways, it feels like it was designed just for NES diehards like me, people who have an abiding affection for not just well-regarded classics like The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. but also for the rougher, more frustrating first-party games on Nintendo’s first console, like Ice climber. But one huge, glaring flaw holds it back, turning it into an interesting curiosity rather than the conversation- and competition-inducing release it could have been.
Let me start with some of the things I really like about this game. First (and least important), I think the Deluxe Set that Nintendo sells is pretty nice. Comes with a set of pins, postcards depicting the box of all the games included in the championships, and a (strictly decorative) gold NES cartridge. Sure, Nintendo is paying homage to itself, but this is a well-made assortment of goodies at much lower prices than the typical “special editions.”
Now to the game itself. Nintendo Championships is essentially a set of challenges that have you playing moments from classic NES games and trying to reach a given goal as quickly as possible. They range from very short and simple (grab the sword at the start of The Legend of Zelda) to much more challenging (beat Super Mario Bros.), and I think the game structure is great. The way it starts by making you do the simplest things gives you a sense of how important every little movement can be. You learn from experience that precious milliseconds can be gained or lost in something as basic as jump angle.
In that respect, it feels like a real gateway to the joy of speed running. As you tackle one of the game’s more complex challenges, forcing you to complete an entire stage or even an entire game, you internally understand that it’s a matter of putting all the pieces together, trying to pull off each move as gracefully and efficiently as you were going through the motions in those much smaller challenges you started with. I probably played World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. hundreds of times in my life and yet Nintendo World Championship made me, for the first time ever, really focus on finishing it as quickly as possible and it felt like a completely different stage. Just winning 1-1 is easy as pie. Defeat him really quickly and effectively? This takes practice and determination. repeatedly Nintendo World Championship excited me by giving me exciting new ways to tackle games I’ve been close to for most of my life, and I suspect I’ll continue to have fun coming back to them for a while and trying to improve your rating in some of the game’s many challenges.
But here we come to the game’s colossal omission. You know what would make me (and, I suspect, thousands of other players) fall that much more in love with these challenges, and that much more determined to return to them again and again to improve my time? Rankings. Especially friend rankings. See if I knew a friend of mine took the Screw Attack power up Metroid .03 seconds faster than me, you better believe I’ll be obsessed with doing it over and over until I beat her time. For me, this game could have been the hottest source of online competition since Pac-Man Championship Edition invaded Xbox Live back in 2007. And you know what Pac-Man CE offered at the top of the charts that helped make it such a competitive sensation? The ability to watch replays of your friends’ games to identify exactly how they beat you up to 125,000 points.
There is absolutely no reason Nintendo World Cup should not offer both leaderboards and replays for its challenges. We now know that the game stores replay data! One of its modes is called Survival Mode and pits you against ghostly iterations of seven other players in races to complete three challenges. Okay, Nintendo. So you have the damn data. pleaselet me watch my friends best attempts to complete a cycle of Donkey Kongor a win over Mouser Super Mario Bros. 2. Speedrunning is as much about cooperation and information sharing as it is about competition, and even if you see how a friend shaved five seconds off his time in a given challenge, you still need to complete the technique. It’s absurd that I have to use Twitter to share information like this with my friends and fellow players instead of them just being able to watch my in-game replay.
Obviously I’m speaking as a die-hard NES fan here, but God, this misstep by Nintendo is so crushing. I really think so NWC could and should have been a game that brought people together and made us enthusiastically compete in its countless challenges for many weeks. This could have been one of the games of the summer. Instead, because Nintendo failed to implement sensible online features, it’s an experience we can only really enjoy in isolation. This is an omission that to me is so mind-boggling that I can hardly believe it. I keep waiting for Nintendo to announce that they’re revamping support for challenge-specific leaderboards and the ability to watch friends’ replays. But I doubt it will actually happen. This is Nintendo we’re talking about, a company that, for all its brilliance, has often fallen far behind when it comes to knowing what to do with online functionality.
To be fair, there is ONE online leaderboard in the game, in the aptly titled World Cup mode. Here, every week you and players from around the world can compete in a series of five challenges, and after the week is over, you’re shown how you ranked against everyone else. This is all well and good, but it seems to me to be woefully inadequate. I don’t want to just compete against the tables once a week. I want to have a spirited walk back and forth with my closest friends as we each obsessively try to be the fastest to grab the first mushroom in Super Mario Bros. or beat Ridley Metroid. God, it’s so frustrating. My only hope is that the title of this game…Nintendo World Cup: NES Edition— suggests that we might see other entries in the future, the SNES Edition, maybe the N64 Edition, and so on, and that by the time they do appear, Nintendo decides to add the features that this game is so obviously missing.
