We have already seen Nintendo World Championships NES Edition last month, as Nintendo gave us that surprise announcement. However, for this Nintendo Direct, Nintendo shed light with some interesting new details.
First off, as explained in a little disclaimer, there are no complete NES games from those handpicked for Nintendo World Championships NES Edition. Even when you are trying to meet challenges like finishing Super Mario Bros. ASAP using warp zones, there won’t be a way to play through some of those levels in full by avoiding those War Zones.
Instead of full NES games, Nintendo World Championships NES Edition offers challenges based on those games. Each challenge has its own leaderboard, and there are 150 challenges overall, from 30 games. We have yet to see if those 30 games include any 3rd party titles, but we have seen from the NES Remix series that Nintendo is fully capable of filling that list out on their own.
The Legends Challenges are significantly harder, and may make you want to pull your hair out, but Nintendo has a solution for that. They have integrated “Classified Information” to give players tips on how to finish said Legendary Challenges. What makes this extra fun is the Classified Information sections have been clearly designed with the aesthetic of the old Nintendo Power Player Guides.
And then there is Survival mode, which very much looks like Tetris 99, if Tetris 99 had its license plate sanded off. Instead of playing together online, you can compete with other players with use of their ghostdata.
What we’ve seen so far is groups of eight players competing, with each round ending with half of the players being eliminated. It’s an extremely competitive mode, but much like Tetris 99, that challenge is the reason that you will want to play.
While some fans seem to have wanted something different out of this game, it looks like it was built around making something to appeal to speedrunners in particular. No idea if those high level players will go hunting for exploits to gain an advantage over other players, but it may not reach that point, if this game doesn’t go beyond being a casual experience.
Still, following not only Tetris 99, but Super Mario Bros. 35, and F-Zero 99, it’s clear that Nintendo has their own ideas on how to execute on a battle royale style experience for retro games. We may not really see how well this game idea plays until we actually get it in our hands. But, knowing Nintendo, this may be a sleeper hit, and we just don’t recognize that it is while we aren’t playing it yet.
Nintendo World Championships NES Edition will be released exclusively on the Nintendo Switch on July 18, 2024. You can check out the latest trailer revealing these modes below.
