Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition Update Adds New Survival Mode, Bug Fixes

The Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition just got a day-one update that adds the new Survival Mode while also implementing some bug fixes to address various issues.

Version 1.1.0 for the game was just rolled out on July 17, 2024, and includes fixes to an issue affecting player icons, an issue affecting the favorite-NES-game feature, and many more. The new Survival Mode was previously revealed during the last Nintendo Direct.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition

The new mode will have players racing against ghost data of players worldwide who clocked in for certain milestones.

The launch update means that people who will be getting Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition or those who just got it after pre-ordering it can expect to receive an update after booting it up, according to NintendoLife.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition features 13 of the Japanese studio's most iconic titles and divides them into more than 150 different challenges. Instead of having players run through a game in its entirety, this game features brief and partial moments.

The main objective of these sections is to complete them as fast as possible, particularly faster than other people worldwide.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is basically a speedrunner but designed for beginners. It turns familiar games into something that needs to be played faster and with more accuracy.

When you complete a level in Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, you get a score based on your speed as well as some in-game currency. The latter can be used to unlock more challenges for you to play through.

The game's progression is relatively steady and players start out doing very basic tasks before they move on to completing entire levels or even defeating bosses. However, later on, you will be given extremely difficult challenges, said The Verge.

A Collection of Speedrun Challenges

The structure of Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is pretty open, which means that players can tackle games in the given order or choose to jump around however they want.

But even players who were used to playing some of the games included a lot of times, the new format forces them to play the titles differently.

Whenever you play by yourself, the screen will be divided into two where the left part is your current playthrough and the right part is a record of your fastest run. Many people, even those who are not perfectionists, suddenly get the urge to become competitive, even against themselves.

In Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, games like Super Mario Bros. 3 are very different as there is no point in trying to collect power-ups or defeating enemies along the way. The main point now is to find the fastest route to the end, which most likely means avoiding anything that you see.

While the game draws its name from a series of competitions that date back to 1990, it draws its inspiration much more directly from the speedrunning community. The main single-player mode is also a tribute to this as it is named "Speedrun," according to ArsTechnica.