Baseball NES retrospective: Home plate for home gaming | NES Works #001

Hi! Welcome to the first episode of Good Nintentions, the full-color companion piece to Game Boy World. This series will serve as a chronological survey of the NES (the first year or two of its life, anyway), published less frequently than Game Boy World... basically, as the mood strikes me. The world's not really short on comprehensive surveys of the NES, so I don't expect this to be a particularly popular or well-received series—it's just something that seemed like it would be enjoyable, really. We start at the beginning of the NES's life in Oct. 1985, with what I have arbitrarily pegged as the "first" NES release. Of all the games released alongside the NES at launch, Baseball appeared earliest in Japan, so it's the oldest of Nintendo's U.S. launch titles. It definitely feels its age, but it's not a bad game... merely one that's been surpassed by 30-plus years of countless developers working within a fixed rule set and doing their best to create the ultimate virtual expression of the sport. Despite its simplicity, there's plenty to say about Baseball...