Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a compilation of bite-sized speedrunning challenges lifted straight from Nintendo’s releases for its very first console. It has selections from the original Super Mario Bros., the first Legend of Zelda, and much more, and packages them in a way that requires you to constantly rethink levels you’ve likely played hundreds of times over the past 40 years. As Carolyn Petit wrote when the collection came out, “Repeatedly, Nintendo World Championships thrilled me by giving me exciting new ways to tackle games that I’ve been intimately familiar with for most of my life, and I suspect that I’ll continue having fun going back to it for some time and trying to improve my rating in some of the game’s many challenges.” Unfortunately, as she also notes, it lacks leaderboards for its individual challenges, eliminating the opportunity for fierce competition with friends that could have made this release an essential throwback instead of merely a novel curiosity.