Summary
The nostalgia-drivenNintendo World Championships: NES Editionprimarily sees players partaking in over 150 bite-sized speedrunning challenges from across13 iconic Nintendo titles from the 1980s and ’90s, such asThe Legend of Zelda,Donkey Kong,Metroid, Kirby’s Adventureand Super Mario Bros in a bid to recreate the feeling of the originalNintendo World Championshipsfrom 1990. Players are then given specific grades based on how fast they complete these challenges and can proceed to unlock new challenges with their awarded coins.
The realNintendo World Championshipsof 1990 were score-based, featuring tweaked versions of the games to serve more as mini-games, whereas the newNintendo World Championships: NES Editionis entirely time-based, focusing solely on speedrunning.
While there are a variety of different options on offer to keep players returning, includingtwo online modes: World Championships and Survival.While World Championships presents players with a selection of games that can be played repeatedly to try and get the fastest time possible, Survival Mode sees players with a Nintendo Switch Online membership racing against the ghost data of seven other players.
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition Review: A Paradise For Speedrunners
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a great way for everyone to enjoy some classic throwbacks while challenging their speedrunning skills.
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition’s Survival Mode Needs A Faster Challenge Rotation
Currently, The Challenges Rotate Weekly
ForNintendo World Championships: NES Edition’sSurvival Mode, players can choose their division, with Silver for easy and Gold for hard, before racing to be the first across three rounds of challenges. The game selection is pre-determined, and players can keep retrying a division in a bid to rank on a worldwide leaderboard and potentially appear as future ghost data for others to compete against.Despite its online components, the mode features more of a single-player experiencethat players can use to better themselves for other speedrunning modes, and it is enjoyable enough. However, there’s one change that could make the game’s Survival Mode even better.
Currently,Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition’s Survival Mode challenges rotate weekly, but this would benefit massively from a faster turnaround.With a weekly rotation, once players have beaten the available ghost data for the seven selected players, they have to wait quite several days for a new challenge. Meanwhile, titles such as theSplatoonseries swap their maps far more frequently, withSplatoon 3’s schedule showingmaps rotating roughly every two hours, and a similar system would work well forNintendo World Championships: NES Edition.
Nintendo World Championships: NES Editionlaunched on June 30, 2025, so there hasn’t been any announcement of how well it has sold as of the time of writing, but with such an impressive roster of games represented from Nintendo’s retro catalog, it’s likely that there will be many players partaking in these challenges. Therefore, there should be a substantial pool of data forNintendo World Championships: NES Edition’s Survival Mode to pull from. While a weekly turnaround is fine in the earlier days following its launch, having a faster turnaround would keep the experience fresher for players, as they’ll have a constant flow of new high scores to beat and new challenges to partake in, and would ultimately give players a reason to come back more regularly in the future.
