If you’ve ever seen a record-breaking video game speedrun or watched a Games Done Quick marathon, you’ve probably fantasized about being able to set some decent times on your favorite old games. Sure, it would probably take some practice, but what these speedrunners are doing looks badass that’s difficultright? How hard can it be to press a few buttons for a few minutes with good timing?
After a few weeks with Nintendo World Championships: NES EditionI don’t think so anymore. The game’s bite-sized chunks of classic Nintendo games emphasize the level of precision required for even a few minutes of speedrunning perfection, not to mention the tedium of practicing the same in-game moves dozens of times to build up the necessary muscle memory. In the process, I gained a new respect for the skill displayed by the best speedrunners and found a new way to experience some classic NES games that I felt like I knew back to front.
Must go fast
While Nintendo World Championships takes its name from a series of competitions dating back to the 1990s, but draws its inspiration much more directly from the more recent rise of the online speedrunning community. As such, the game’s single-player mode is called “Speedrun,” where players must set the fastest times in 150 mini-challenges spread across 13 different Nintendo-developed NES titles.
Nintendo
The first of these many unlockable challenges seems almost insultingly easy at first glance: collecting the first Super Mushroom in Super Mario Bros. or collect the sword in The Legend of Zeldafor example. When you first dive in, you might be more than a little bewildered to discover that you’re showered with in-game rewards for spending just a few seconds completing such basic tasks.
But then you look at how much time that challenge cost you—which is thrown up on the screen in large numbers—along with an even larger number. The “A” you got for collecting that Mushroom might seem pretty good at first, but you know you could do better if you hadn’t missed the item box on your first few jumps. So you quickly restart the challenge (taking a deep breath during a helpful three-second countdown) and shave half a second off your second attempt, earning an “A+” for your efforts.
If you’re a certain type of gamer, you might say, “Okay, that’s good enough,” rather than repeating this cycle again (if so, I’d say this game isn’t for you). But if you’re a different type of gamer, the simple knowledge that you could be Achieving an S rank through a combination of strategy and execution will see you race through minutes of attempts, optimizing the few perfect seconds of button pressing.
The fact that Nintendo doesn’t disclose specific timing cutoffs for the various letter grades is as frustrating as it is subtly encouraging here. There were plenty of challenges where I felt like I’d played as optimally as possible, only to be greeted with a simple “A++” rank next to my new best time. The mere existence of the S rank often inspired me to redouble my efforts and look for new ways to shave even more time off my personal best.