Nintendo’s always finding new ways to reintroduce people to the NES library. Whether it’s putting them out on the Game Boy Advance, including them as bonuses in Animal Crossing, available for download on the Wii and Wii U, or available with the Nintendo Switch Online service, there’s almost always a way to play Super Mario Bros. on a Nintendo console. But those are always straight ports of the old games. They did do the NES Remix series on 3DS and Wii U, which changed things up a bit, but otherwise, it’s been the same thing. This year, Nintendo released Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, bringing with it a new way to experience these games.

The focus with NWC Is speedrunning, which is not normally my thing. The game includes over 150 speedrun challenges over thirteen NES games, ranging from grabbing an item as fast as you can to playing through all of the original Super Mario Bros. The single player game is simply doing one challenge after another and trying to get as fast of a time as possible on each one. It’s fun, but not particularly meaty. It doesn’t help that there isn’t leaderboards to compete with your friends. You’re just kind of doing it to do it.

Thankfully, the World Championship mode is much more interesting. Every week, the game presents five specific challenges for the world to compete in. New challenges are presented every Monday, and it gives you something to really focus on. Especially in the first few weeks the game was out, I spent way too much time just running the same three second sections of a game, trying to shave as many milliseconds off my time as possible. I spent at least an hour one night just grabbing the Morph Ball powerup at the beginning of Metroid over and over again. It was really addicting and I had a great time doing it.

Once the week is over, you’ll see the results of how you did against everyone else who competed. You’ll see both where you placed against the rest of the world, as well as just against people born the year you were born. In my experience, I end up in the same percentile in both categories every time. I’m curious if that’s true with other people in different age groups.

As the time has gone on, I haven’t been putting as much time into the World Championships. I’m still competing each week, but rarely am I just repeatedly running the same challenges over and over again. But getting those results each week is still a thrill. I’ve had a few (tied for) first places, and those are some of my favorite moments playing anything this year.

There’s a few other modes included. There’s a battle royale style mode where you play through three challenges against ghost data of other players. I kind of wish that it was against live opponents, but I can understand why they went the way they did. Don’t have to worry about anyone disconnecting or anything like that. This was a fun mode to mess around with early on, but I stopped after a few weeks. The game also includes a party mode, which is basically just an online version of this mode, but with your friends on the couch.

As you play through the various modes, you earn coins. The main thing those coins are used for early on is to unlock more challenges in the single player mode, but you’ll  mostly use them to unlock avatars for your profile. I’m still unlocking them, but I’ve basically settled on Triclyde from Super Mario Bros. 2. Speaking of your profile, when setting it up, you’re asked what your favorite NES game is. This information is shown in your ghost data or in replays in the Championship mode. There’s a shockingly complete list of games to choose from. I went with Dynowarz, which you might remember me talking about just the other day. It’s not actually my favorite NES game, but I was shocked to see it listed and had to represent it.

Overall, I really like Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition. It’s true that I don’t spend as much time with it as I did when it first came out, but it’s the kind of game I like checking in on every week. The single player is kind of shallow and there’s not much to do beyond the World Championship mode, but if that sounds fun to you, it gets my recommendation.