Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition

Play it on: Switch
Buy it from: Best Buy | GameStop
Current goal: Prove I’m the best around, and nothing’s gonna ever keep me down

In my NES-playing youth, it was common for me to make up my own challenges to tackle after I’d mastered a game the “normal” way. Can I beat Mega Man 2 mostly just using the Buster? Can I beat Super Mario Bros. without relying on mushrooms or other power-ups? Things like that. And I know I’m not the only one. In talking to others over the years, I’ve learned it was quite common for kids to devise challenges that gave us new goals to shoot for and lent new replay value to NES games we’d otherwise mastered. Now, Nintendo has put out its own collection of time-based challenges for its own first-party NES games (sorry, Mega Man 2), and I’ll be spending a fair chunk of this weekend seeing if I’ve still got the stuff.

Weirdly, despite being called Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition (emphasis on “World Championships”), apparently there aren’t leaderboards for its many challenges, so you can’t actually compete directly with your friends or the wider world. (There is one weekly challenge everyone can participate in which is ranked, but, for now at least, that’s it.) This is an absolutely puzzling decision to me, albeit one that seems par for the course for Nintendo, which historically seems to struggle with implementing online features in a smart, player-friendly way. All week, as I’ve been anticipating this game, I’ve been thinking back on how the Xbox 360 era of Xbox Live was a golden age for leaderboard competition and online activity. It was a time when I gleefully invested hours in playing Pac-Man CE or Geometry Wars in an effort to surpass my friends on the high score charts, and I’d hoped this game might rekindle some of that competitive enthusiasm in me, but for NES games. It seems that’s not to be.

Still, I’m keeping an open mind. I love many of the games featured here—Metroid, Zelda II, Donkey Kong—and even those I don’t love (like Ice Climber) I think could be the stuff of entertaining one-off challenges, so I’m eager to jump in and see just what sorts of tests of skill Nintendo has devised. Perhaps my friends and I will just have to resort to sharing our best times in a group chat or something, which won’t be nearly as cool or seamless as doing so via an in-game leaderboard, but I’ll take what I can get. And I’m already thinking about how that NES Edition in the name implies that this may be the first of many. Nintendo, please, for the sake of all that is good and holy in this world, add proper leaderboards by the time you get around to making the SNES edition. Please! — Carolyn Petit