Video Game Nerd: Blast From the Past- RBI Baseball by Will Leitch

Nostalgia is a problem. Nostalgia holds us back. As I get older, I find myself, perhaps inevitably, starting to believe that Things Were Better when I was a kid. All humans do this: It's why Baby Boomer sportswriters are always convinced Mickey Mantle was some bastion of purity because they didn't know any better when they were 15, it's why your dad hated your music and it's why you have no idea what the hell the deal is with Pharrell's hat.

We're completely wrong about this: As you get older you get less reliable about the past, and especially the present, not more so. Things weren't better when I was young; my misguided belief that they were is partly an attempt to convince myself that my youth was more joyous and innocent than it really was, and partly plain envy-disguised-as-disgust at people lucky enough to be in their youth right now.

Nostalgia tricks us, because nostalgia makes us think we want things we actually don't. Listening to, say, "The Humpty Dance" makes us smile, not because it's a particularly good song (I'm more of a "Same Song" guy), but because we associate it with a different time than our own, a time we think of fondly, even if we shouldn't. Chuck Klosterman wrote, "When we appreciate things from our past, we're latently arguing that those things are still important -- and if those things are important, we can pretend our own life is equally important, because those are the things that comprise our past." If we do not understand something, as we get older, our response increasingly isn't to learn more about it; it's to claim that it's inferior to something older, something we dounderstand. But way you remember The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air is different than the way that show actually is. If someone were to make an exact duplication of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and put it on television, it would be idiotic. You would hate it.

Nostalgia is a feeling. And things are things.

You can package and market nostalgia. But you have to sell actual things. Which brings us to the new RBI Baseball, which will launch on Xbox 360, PS3 and the Apple App Store on Wednesday.

Read article here: RBI Baseball by Will Leitch