Let’s talk about speed.
As someone who has been excited about Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition since its initial leak and subsequent announcement, I’m probably exactly the target audience for this game. Born in 1979, my formative grade school and middle school years were defined by playing these NES games and quite frankly, I’ve never stopped. A year hasn’t gone by without me replaying NES Metroid and Zelda games since they were initially released. I spent the summer of 2021 learning to speed-run Metroid, and have had multiple randomizer challenges with both of those games – including some that combine them.
Now that the game is released, I’ve gotten the S-Rank in each challenge and seen all that the game has to offer. The narrative I’ve seen on social media and heard in podcasts is that the game is not fully featured, and lacks basic online competitive features such as leaderboards. In this I fully agree; the game is lacking these features and it’s worse for it. I’m not in the business of reviewing games anymore, but if I were, this game loses several points for whiffing on its goal of instilling a spirit of competition amongst your online friends.
The other narrative I’ve seen, however, is that this game is just a worse version of NES Remix, and in that I actually can’t agree. After finishing all of the challenges in NWC: NES Edition, I picked up my 3DS and revisited NES Remix Ultimate, and watched some online footage of NES Remix for Wii U, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that comparing NWC: NES Edition directly to NES Remix doesn’t do justice to the things that NWC does incredibly well.
At its core, NWC: NES Edition is a game that celebrates speedrunning in a way that Nintendo doesn’t often acknowledge. Speedrunning is often something that Nintendo leaves to the community as it represents playing a game in a way that Nintendo hasn’t necessarily intended, and Nintendo is nothing if not super into controlling the gameplay experience. Seeing Nintendo embrace speedrunning in a way like this is refreshing, and shows a self-awareness we don’t see from them very often. Does it feel half-hearted when they tell you that using the pipes in Super Mario Bros. 1-1 is not allowed? Sure, I’d hear that argument. Nonetheless, it’s very interesting to see Nintendo’s perspective on the speedrunning experience, combining years of community engagement with authorial intent.
The primary way in which NWC: NES Edition embraces speedrunning is through the use of ghost data. It’s possible that NES Remix has ghost data, I don’t remember. What I can say, having revisited the 3DS version after completing all the challenges in NWC is that the ghost data is not presented right next to you when you’re playing the challenges. The spirit of NWC is speedrunning, and if that’s what you’re interested in, NWC wipes the floor with NES Remix. The presentation, the timer, and most importantly, the presence of your personal best ghost data alongside your playthrough in the single player challenge mode gives you something to race against every time you play, helping you understand where you can gain time, and where you’ve struggled. It’s a major quality-of-life feature for speedrunning that NES Remix doesn’t really mess around with, because NES Remix is not about speedrunning.
I won’t argue that NWC is lacking in game variety, and I won’t argue that NES Remix doesn’t have more interesting challenges. I simply think that trying to insist that we would be better served by putting NES Remix on Switch fails to understand the things that NWC: NES Edition does very well. I lost interest in completing all the challenges in NES Remix after a while because it didn’t feel like there was incentive to get better at them. In NWC: NES Edition, there’s always a race to be had, even if it’s just against myself.
