In Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, you play a series of games that came out on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Or, rather, you play a series of gamelets: choice cuts of the classics, sliced free of context, pressurised with a stopwatch, and presented as a gauntlet.
How quickly can you retrieve the morph ball in Metroid, down to the millisecond? Or uproot a vegetable in Super Mario Bros. 2? Trust Nintendo to make play of our nostalgia. Why merely look back, when you can compress all that passing time and shave all those old moments into a sharp new challenge?
This collection takes its name from a real competition, first hosted in 1990, which toured twenty-nine American cities. The winners in each of the three age brackets were awarded a ten-thousand-dollar U.S. savings bond, a 1990 Geo Metro convertible, and a forty-two-inch rear-projection television. What an odd combination of winnings – a mixture of the grounded and the mobile, sure to appeal to those lapped in comfort but itching for escape. No wonder the Championships concluded, in Los Angeles, with a showdown at the Star Trek Theatre; take first place, and you would have everything you need to settle down and beam up.
The riches may have dwindled since then. Bag a sufficiently high score here, and you are given pin badges. I wish I could report that these are posted to you in crinkly brown envelopes, but, alas, you can only swivel them in a fetching 3-D render. (Purchase the physical version, however, and you will receive a clutch of these badges, plus a sheaf of postcards and a gilded NES cartridge for your trouble.) Still, it’s difficult to deny the appeal of shiny prizes, even if that glint has been digitally applied. The idea, I guess, is to invoke the feel of that far-off era, hence the menus: a grid of purple lines, raking away into a dark-blue void. It resembles those bloodless vacuums in Tron. Hence, too, the message at the start, in which Nintendo bemoans that barriers to entry back then – namely, having to gas up the Geo Metro and scoot to each venue in person. “And some of you faced an even greater obstacle: not yet being born.” For shame!
The action unfolds in split-screen. Your current attempt is displayed on the left, your previous on the right, both hemmed in by thick borders. Attain a sufficiently fast time, and you are graded with an “A+,” or the much-coveted “S,” at which point you receive your badge and try for the next. If that sounds like a sparse loop, it is, but the urge to try and try again is fierce, bolstered by the ability to instantly restart a level at any point. We also have World Championships, in which you take on five levels and post a completion time online, to be bested by other players. And there is also Survival Mode, where you battle the recorded runs of other players in successive rounds.
Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition will disappoint two groups of people. First, those who hunger for an honest anthology. There are thirteen games in all, diced into chunks, and you have no chance to enjoy them taken straight. Second, those who don’t mind – or are all for – the dicing, but wish that it came with a little more introspection. The latter group may have been hoping for an update on NES Remix, which was released on the Wii U in 2014. It offered the same speed-running spectacle in a more evocative package, all cream menus and curved screens; but its best trick, true to its title, was to whisk the games together. Why not clamber up the ladders of Donkey Kong as Link, stripped of the ability to jump? Or play a version of Super Mario Bros. wherein the opening level is lacquered in slippery frost? It was a wondrous suggestion: that your memories could melt into one another and form an enveloping, Nintendo-coloured fabric.
The developer was indieszero, a Tokyo-based team that collaborated with Nintendo EAD, and the same partnership is responsible for the new game. The brief, sadly, has changed. You can hardly blame a game for what it isn’t, but when you have a studio, blessed with an outsider’s eye, capable of much more, it’s tough not to wish that it had been given a freer hand. An earlier work from indieszero, the underrated Retro Game Challenge for the DS, had a pair of kids forced to play fictional vintage games at the behest of a demon. The result, complete with mocked-up gaming magazines to read, spoke intimately to the way that the medium, and those in its thrall, are scuffed by the passing years. Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is undoubtedly fun, despite its slightness, but you come away feeling undernourished. It asks you to chase your own ghosts, in search of a better time, as if you hadn’t spent the intervening decades doing just that.
Game: Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Developer: indieszero/Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Release Date: Out now
