God, Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition So frustrating. I am this Almost absolutely love the various timed challenges in the NES games. In a lot of ways, it feels like it was designed specifically for NES pathobs like me, who have more than an abiding fondness for revered classics like this The Legend of Zelda and super mario bros. But it also applies to the rougher, more frustrating first-party games on Nintendo’s first console, e.g. ice climber. But one huge, glaring flaw holds it back from being an entertaining curiosity rather than the conversation- and competition-driven version it could have been.
Let me start with some of the things I really like about this game. First (and least), I think the deluxe bundle Nintendo is selling is pretty good. It comes with a set of pins and postcards containing the box art for all the games championship, and a (strictly decorative) gold NES cartridge. Sure, it’s all Nintendo paying homage to itself, but it’s a collection of well-made goodies at a much lower price than your typical “special edition” price.
Now, onto the game itself. Nintendo Championship Essentially a series of challenges that have you playing segments from classic NES games and trying to achieve a given goal as quickly as possible. These ranges are very short and simple (grab the sword at the start) The Legend of Zelda) is more challenging (beat super mario bros.), and I think the structure of the game is great. It starts by asking you to do the simplest things, making you feel the importance of every small action. You know from experience that precious milliseconds can be gained or lost on something as basic as jump angle.
In that respect, it feels like a real gateway to speedrunning fun. When you tackle one of the more complex challenges in the game, which is completing an entire level or even an entire game, you’ll intrinsically understand that it’s a matter of fitting all the pieces together and trying to complete each move gracefully. When you complete those much smaller challenges at the beginning, you’ll move through the motions efficiently. I may have played World 1-1 super mario bros. Hundreds of times in my life but Nintendo World Championship For the first time ever, it felt like a completely different phase that pushed me to really focus on getting it done as quickly as possible. Simply winning 1-1 was a piece of cake. Really beat it quickly and efficiently? This takes practice and determination. repeatedly, Nintendo World Championship What excites me is that it gives me exciting new ways to approach a game I’ve been very familiar with for most of my life, and I suspect I’ll continue to have fun with it for a while and try to improve my skills in some areas Score the game’s many challenges.
But this is where our huge oversight of the game comes in. You know what would make me (and I suspect thousands of other players) even more obsessed with these challenges, and more determined to return to them again and again to improve our times? Ranking list. Especially the friend rankings. Listen, if I knew a friend of mine was metroid vanguard 0.03 seconds faster than me, you better believe I’ll be addicted to doing it again and again until I beat her time. To me, this game is probably the hottest source of online competition since Pac-Man Championship Edition It suddenly appeared on Xbox Live back in 2007. Pac-Man CE Is it offered on top of a leaderboard, making it a competitive feel? Get the chance to watch replays of your friends’ matches and see exactly how they surpassed you and achieved 125,000 points.
absolutely no reason Nintendo World Championship Leaderboards and challenge replays should not be available at the same time. We already know the game stores replay data! One of the modes, called Survival Mode, pits you against ghost replays of seven other players in a match to complete three challenges. Well, Nintendo. So you have damn data. pleaselet me see my friends’ best attempts at completing the loop Donkey Kongor defeat Mouser super mario bros 2. Speedrunning is as much about competition as it is about collaboration and sharing information, even if you look How a friend shaved five seconds off his time on a given challenge, you still have to perform the technique. It’s ridiculous that I have to share this with my friends and other players via Twitter, instead of having them just watch replays of my game.
Obviously, I’m speaking here as a die-hard NES fan, but man, this blunder from Nintendo is shocking. i really think northwest world committee What could and should have been a game that brought people together, allowing us to passionately tackle countless challenges over the course of weeks. This could be one of the games of the summer. Instead, we’re left in isolation to truly enjoy the experience, thanks to Nintendo’s failure to implement reasonable online functionality. To me, this is an incredible oversight and I can hardly believe it. I’ve been looking forward to Nintendo announcing they were patching to support leaderboards for specific challenges and the ability to watch friends replay. But I doubt this will actually happen. This is Nintendo we’re talking about, a company that, despite its brilliance, is often far behind the curve when it comes to understanding how to take advantage of online capabilities.
To be fair, there is an online leaderboard in the game, a World Championship mode. Here, each week, you and players around the world can compete in a series of five challenges, and once the week is over, you’ll see where you rank against others. That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t feel like enough. I don’t just want to compete with the masses once a week. I wanted to have an energetic back and forth with my closest friends as we each became obsessed with grabbing the first mushroom as quickly as possible super mario bros. Or beat Ridley metroid vanguard. Gosh, this is so disappointing. My only hope is the title of this game –Nintendo World Championship: NES Edition— hinting that in the future, we might see other entries, an SNES version, maybe an N64 version, etc., and when those came out, Nintendo decided to add features that the game was noticeably lacking.
