I know everyone has their eyes glued to the election result. I do. I don't think I'll get much acomplished this morning....

So to distract you all from it (at least for a few minutes) something completely different!

If you are an NES kid like me, you probably have fond memories of RBI Baseball. It was the first good baseball game for the NES and the one we all played constantly.

Compared to modern baseball games, control was rudimentary. You could move left and right in the batter's box and control the speed of your swing, but that's it. The pitching controls were equally simple. It was better than what we had had before, but still simple. But that simplicity worked for us and made it more fun since we could just worry about playing the game rather than trying to master complex mechanics.

While it didn't use real teams, it did use real player names. It also even programmed the players to be somewhat similar to real life. For example, Nolan Ryan has the fastest pitch in the game. This was huge for us kids in 1987. It didn't matter if the team names were different—we could play as our favorite players!

There were two sequels on the NES, RBI Baseball 2 and RBI Baseball 3. The second was fairly similar to the first, so we loved it, but the third changed things up enough that it wasn't quite as good. The first remained the best. I think they made a number of sequels for other systems, but I never played any of them.

Anyway, looks like one fan has updated the game to feature all 30 of the 2024 MLB teams and all the players. Wow!

^{Note the batter's name (Ohtani)}

It looks like they updated the name to have 30 teams, with 16 players per team (12 batters and 4 pitchers). So now not only can we play the best baseball game of the NES era, but with a modern roster!

You can download the .nes file from the site. Right here. I assume most of you know how to find an NES emulator for your PC or Mac or already have one, but if you don't, just Google it and you can find many emulators pretty easily.

Anyway, have fun!

❦

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Twitter or Mastodon.