Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition feels like Nintendo for the TikTok era
We'll fix it in the edit.
Between WarioWare, NES Remix and Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition, Nintendo has a real thing for chopping its games into pieces. Tiny pieces, quite often. When it comes to Nintendo World Championships, the unwieldy name is easily the lengthiest single thing about it. For the rest of the game, it's, what, 10 seconds, 50 at a push? This is Nintendo doing TikTok, Nintendo in the editing suite. And it's fascinating.
Nintendo World Championship is all about speedrunning. The game takes 13 old Nintendo classics and slices them down to form around 150 one-shot challenges. So Super Mario Bros, for example, has a challenge about getting a mushroom, a challenge about collecting all the coins in an underground section, a challenge about beating 1-1 as fast as you can. Ice Climber has challenges about reaching certain floors. The original Legend of Zelda has challenges about entering that cave and grabbing the sword and challenges about defeating enemies as quickly as possible. Metroid...
Two things are obvious. Firstly, I think the shorter challenges are by far the best. Maybe it's all those years of playing WarioWare, but when Nintendo World Championship gives you something that will take you 30 seconds - say a jump challenge through a Metroid passageway - my attention starts to wander. It's not that I can't handle 30 seconds of doing one thing - my ability to focus hasn't atrophied that much quite yet - it's more that the game sort of primes me for very quick things, so when I'm asked to do moderately quick things, everything drags.
Secondly, there aren't that many outfits who have a back catalogue as well suited to this as Nintendo. With games exclusively from the 8-bit era, Nintendo World Championship is living in a world of playful immediacy. To see a Mario screen is to know what you have to do. Same for Zelda, Metroid, ExciteBike. You can see the whole world, not just a first-person slice of it. You don't need to worry about camera controls or twin sticks. Gosh, my life used to be simple. Sure, Sony could do something like this - 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 chug at the start of it all which is entirely absent from NES games.
Even as I type that, I wonder if I'm entirely correct, though. These games seem more immediate to me, but I'm extremely old by this point. Would they be as immediate to my ten-year-old, or would the cognitive chugging turn up just because her games no longer look like this? I would ask, but it's her last week of school and she's in rehearsals for the play. Another time!
Nintendo World Championship breaks down into four main elements, I think. There's the single-player mode where you just play 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 fair against the rest of the world, when the results are announced. Then there's a mode that pitches you into a bunch of challenges in which you race 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 a console's lifespan, but it's hard to get too grumpy about it when it's both so nicely packaged, like an 80s US game show that would have been broadcast in the middle of the night on a Friday back in the 90s, and so idiosyncratic. And it's funny, that thought about Sony or Microsoft doing the same. I'd love to see that, but what I'd really love to see is a sort of indie games all-stars take on this. Make a river in Dorfromantik! Kill a shopkeeper in Spelunky! Onwards! Outwards! Faster and faster!