Vidjama Gmaes Work

I’m glad I didn’t buy it.

NES World Championships is one of those games I should have known from the start that I wouldn’t have wanted to buy.

The game contains 13 NES games sliced up into tiny pieces and served up as challenges. You have the obvious like the Super Mario games, Zelda, Donkey Kong. Then you have less orthodox speedrun games like Balloon Fight, Excitebike, and Kirby and Metroid. Then you have total dog shit like Ice Climbers. For what it’s worth I can appreciate what they did with NES World Championship even if it’s not a game I would play for more than a weekend rental.

You have to fall into one of a few categories to be the target audience for NES World Championships:

1.) You’re ultra-competitive specifically over retro games. There is a world championship mode that cycles every week with five competitions. I’m not sure what it says about the number of people who bought the game that there are 27,000 entries in the latest competition with a couple of days to go and this game just came out a month ago. And by ultra-competitive I mean sweaty nerds who have been playing these games for hundreds of hours.

You do get to see the #1 player’s run in each category which is fun and impressive.

2.) You have friends who will come over and play with you so you can pretend it’s just like the old days. I don’t have friends who do that. My friends are all busy playing MMOs, Monster Hunter, Pathfinder, femboy dating simulators, and more to play competitive NES game snippets from the past.

3.) Really, really enthusiastic about retro NES games. In which case you’re probably not playing on the Switch because the controllers are terrible for input lag.

NES World Championships has a half life in my opinion that is measured in hours rather than days, and it goes a little like this. You play through and start unlocking the easier challenges to build up coins and gradually unlock the harder ones. Maybe you pick a specific game you personally like and just blow through it until you get all the way to the end only to realize that the final challenge is basically beat the whole game. Maybe you stop, maybe you do it.

And then you’ve unlocked everything you’re planning on unlocking, and then you play through the same 5-15 second challenges over and over until you realize that you’re probably as good as you’re going to ever get on them. And then there’s not a whole lot left to do other than brute force your way through the games you don’t like to see what scores you get, and that just builds more animosity toward the game.

Ice Climbers will always suck no matter the generation you play it in, but the game that seems to get most redeemed is The Lost Levels at least up until the later challenges because you’re playing such small snippets that the sadistic nature of the game doesn’t get translated as well. A lot of the games tell you exactly where you need to go or what you need to pick up while you’re playing them with big arrows and circles. Metroid NES only got better with save states.

Also the challenges themselves are extremely hit or miss in terms of fun factor. Like I said, once you get to the point of grinding challenges to unlock new challenges the big challenge becomes enduring the game to get more of the game. I do own the NES controllers for the Switch because I’m a nerd and I spend my money wisely, so I was already equipped to play these as best you could hope on the system. And they do work fine.

As a fan of Summoning Salt and speedrunning that I have no interest in participating in, I am not in the demographic for this game. If you are, you probably don’t need my approval to buy it because you already did on day one.

Score: 7/10