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The Gratuitous Rainbow Spectrum

Stone Age Gaming: Nintendo World Championships Carts

Stone Age Gaming: Nintendo World Championships Carts

Kris Randazzo
12 minute read

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition for Nintendo Switch is out in the world, as is its super cool physical edition. What's in the box? How does it compare to the actual Nintendo World Championships from 1990? Let's take a look!

EverDrive-N8 Pro (Black Core) [NES]

EverDrive-N8 Pro (Black Core) [NES]

$211.99

This is the Black Core version of the EverDrive-N8 Pro for the NES. It comes assembled in a black shell with a Molten Core style label and held...… read more

Transcript of the video: 

Hi there Kris from Stone Age Gamer here, and welcome back to Stone Age Gaming. Today I would like to spend a little bit of time talking About this fella.This is Nintendo World Championships NES edition for Nintendo Switch. And this is the super cool physical edition they released, which came with a bunch of really neat extras That I thought would be fun to show in Detail here on Camera, and also maybe talk a little bit About the actual Nintendo World Championships, which was pretty different from this guy right here in some kind of surprising ways. So without further ado, let's take a look.

All right. Well, here is the Nintendo World Championships NES edition. Deluxe set. Ensemble. Deluxe set. Deluxe. If you want to read it in different languages. But this is the this is the box it came in, and it's a more sturdy box than I expected. If you remember, a lot of the, like, Gamecube era stuff like Mario Party, they came in thinner boxes. This is a pretty decently thick cardboard. So you got to like that. It's got that's embossed on the front, so it's got a good feeling to it. I like the cover art and it's got all of the NES sprites. Any game that features pit from Kid Icarus on the cover is good by me. And here's all your your basic information on the back of what it comes with, which we're going to go ahead and crack this open and take a look. 

Now, I already have a couple of things from this out and about, because I just have them on display in my house, and I didn't feel like packing up the box again. But let's take a look at what is inside. So this one here, this was actually for the, this right here, which is a gold cartridge, reproduction cartridge that came with it and it was a reproduction cartridge is a bit much. It's literally just the cart. There is nothing going on in here. This does doesn't fit in any s. I mean, it fits in in any s, but it's not going to do anything because there's no game in it. However it is, it just feels like an NES cartridge. It it's it feels like it's made of the same plastic. It doesn't seem painted gold like the Zelda cartridge did. I think this might actually just be gold plastic, but I could be wrong. I like this, you know, replacement stuff on the back here, all these fun little sprites that are printed on the cartridge itself. It's pretty neat. And it comes with this adorable stand, which is really quite nice. It's not glass. It's super thick plastic, though. It's very sturdy. And it'll hold the cartridge like so. It won't hold a rag regular cartridge because it goes where the board goes. So, this is pretty much designed for holding this, place thing. It's nice. It is very nice. It's a neat little thing. I do wish there was a little bit more to it. It would be very cool if it functioned, but, that is not the case. 

The sleeve, however, is very weird because this is definitely not the same material that, the original NES sleeves are. I stuffed all the packing material in here. This feels so. The original sleeves were very plasticky. This feels not quite cardboard, but more cardboard than original, nest sleeves. So it looks the part, but it doesn't feel the part, which is very strange, but that's what you know. This goes in. This can fit in there if you so choose. I didn't I actually like, putting this up on my shelf because I think it makes for a neat display piece. Moving on. This is the actual game itself. Just comes in a standard switch case. So if you're worried about having to put this on your shelf in it. No. Not matching, everything else, you can put that away somewhere. And this can sit on your shelf and match the rest of your switch games. And it looks pretty nice. It's got these little, like, pins, listed on the inside here. The cartridge itself is kind of small, and this is no instructions, but, it's not just plain white. I hate it when you open up a one of these, switch games in the system. White blankness. At least there's some nice artwork going on in there, so good job, Nintendo. That looks pretty nice. 

So let's see what else we got in here. There are, there's just just cardboard packaging from that point. What have we here? Oh, these are probably the pins, right? This came with a cool looking pin set to, the pins that were pictured on the inside of the sleeve there. This is some of them in actual form. These are real pins. They're metal. They, feel very nice. They look very nice. It makes for a pretty snazzy display. I'm not much of a pin guy myself. I have a handful of Nintendo pins because they've done Nintendo pins like Mario pins and anniversary pins in the past, and I have them because they're neat, but I don't really know what to do with them. They just kind of sit in my closet. But I guess there are folks out there who are big fans of pins, and this is for them. It's definitely not for me. This was what I thought was really cool, though. This is, a collection of neat little art art pieces. They're not like art books. It's it's they're individual like cards. Like postcards. Almost. So they are, the original NES covers for all of these, all of these games, as they, as they looked when they originally released, on one side, except for this is the Famicom Disk System. And because this never released North America, which made me so sad that they didn't make one of that box art they created for Lost Levels when they were advertising Super Mario All-Stars, because that would have been so cool. But anyways, that's this. But on the other side, you have these, which are just fun little pictures of sprites from every one of the games. Of all the characters doing these, neat little poses, these I think are incredibly cool. I would actually really like to maybe put these together in some sort of mosaic and hang these, get them framed or something. These are just really cool designs. I love. I love the old NES sprite art, obviously. Because who doesn't? It's great, but I think this would make for a really nice display somewhere. These were, these are extraordinarily cool, I love that.  

Okay, well, that's the Nintendo World Championships NES edition for Nintendo Switch in a nutshell. It is a very neat game. I have some issues with it. You can read my full review at Nintendo Force Magazine. Which is where I put all of my thoughts down. But really, what it all boils down to is this is neat, but it makes some very strange omissions, which to a degree makes sense, but then others don't. And honestly, the biggest problem I have with it is how little it has to do with this. This is my reproduction cartridge of the Nintendo World Championships 1990 cartridge. This is the original Nintendo World Championships. This was reproduced by a retro zone, which I think is retro USB. Now, I think it's how that all changed and rejiggered. But anyway, I've had this thing for ages and I love it. It is just a reproduction of the actual Nintendo World Championships, and it is a super cool cartridge. It's this kind of clear ish bluish cartridge. It's got these dip switches on it to change things around. Obviously, the actual Nintendo World Championships cartridge is extremely difficult to get your hands on. But in the instruction booklet here, it kind of breaks down a little bit of the history. That's what the actual cartridges looked like. They're used in competition that were given away to the winners, and some of them were available for sale through Nintendo Power. And, you know, this tells you what the Dip switches do and the way the game works. 

So how this actually worked is you would play through Super Mario Brothers, then Rad Racer and Tetris. Rad Racer and Tetris are not included in Nintendo World Championships. Any edition. Now I get it. Rad Racer is a Square Enix joint. They own that property. That said, Tetris and Nintendo have a great relationship, so, I cannot imagine it would have been too terribly expensive, especially given Tetris 99 exists to get Tetris into this, Nintendo World Championships NES edition. And really, how much is square going to charge to use Rad Racer? Like not being able to actually recreate the original Nintendo World Championships in Nintendo World Championships on Nintendo Switch is kind of a bummer because, I think that would have been a really fun thing to have in the Nintendo World Championships NES edition is the actual one, and then a World Championships, but I digress. What makes that even more strange is that there are analogs to those games that Nintendo could have used that were used in the later competition cartridges, because they didn't stop at 1990. In fact, in 1991, there was the Nintendo campus challenged. This is also a repro from Retro Zone about that. It works in a very similar fashion. It's, you know, the nice blue cartridge and came with the instruction manual. But this was Super Mario Brothers three, which is in NASA World Championship Edition pinball, which is not in, the NES edition on switch. But that's okay. They don't own pinball, but they own pinball. They could have put pinball in there. And Doctor Mario, which is also, strangely not in an entire World Championships NES edition. 

This is where I kind of draw a blank. Functionally, this cartridge works almost exactly the same way as this one. It just, you know, automatically goes from game to game, and then records your score and you write it down at the end. You have to use the second player controller to start the game. They're really cool things to have. And they're extraordinarily cool, games to play through and they're fun to make competitions out of. But why they didn't incorporate any elements from these games into this is beyond me. I think it's a very, very strange thing that these aren't referenced. But what else is cool about these is that they didn't stop here either. They continued to do, with, like, this, the 1992 Super Nintendo Campus Challenge. They moved on to Super Nintendo. And that kind of gives me hope for the future that maybe they'll do, I don't know, World Championships Super Edition, in the future. And this was pretty neat. This one had, Super Mario World, F-Zero, and Ken Griffey Jr. Geez, what's the actual name of that game? Oh, no, this was Pilot Wings. I'm sorry, this one, Power Fest 1994 has, there it is. Ken Griffey Junior, Super Mario Kart, and, that I think he played a level of the lost levels from Super Mario All-Stars in here. It's these they kept doing these competition. For years. I think the 93 one, I don't remember what the 93 one was. Maybe 93 was star Fox, superstar Fox Weekend. And then there was also the Donkey Kong Country competition from through Blockbuster Video. That was also, you can get it. I you still can, but I was able to get a repro cartridge of that too. But, Nintendo has a really cool, fascinating history of competition cartridges, and almost none of it is represented in this game, which is pretty neat on its own, but it seems to leave an awful lot of important history and potential on the table. So if you're a big fan of Nintendo World Championships or Nintendo competition cartridges in general, this is a must buy. This collection is really nice and the stuff you get in it is pretty darn cool. The Japanese version actually comes with the Famicom controllers that work on the switch, which is pretty cool. I'm honestly, I really love this cold cartridge. I think it just makes for a really neat conversation piece test set up on a shelf somewhere. But there you go. That is the Nintendo World Championships Genius Edition for Nintendo Switch, and a handful of cool reproduction cartridges that, lend some interesting bits of history to the entire proceedings. Tada! 

Well, there you have it. That's a look at the physical edition of the Nintendo World Championships next edition for Nintendo Switch, as well as some of the other, reproduction cartridges I Have of the original, competition cartridges From way back in the day Which, was so Much fun. I love the entire concept of the Nintendo World Championships. 

Let us know in the comments! I love hearing from everybody. Thanks again for watching. On behalf of all of us here at Stone Age Gamer, keep playing games.

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