STACK #197 Mar 2021

FEATURE GAMING

STACK’s ROVING REPORTER

BEST SELLERS at

What’s your all-time favourite game series?

Easily the Bioshock series – I’ve always been drawn to the first two, especially. Rapture is just such a beautiful location, and the storylines that run through the series are incredible. I love the survival horror game play style, and the little sisters are just the cutest things ever.

FEBRUARY 2021

1 SUPER MARIO 3D WORLD + BOWSER’S FURY

AIMEE KIELY @ JB Hi-Fi Booragoon,WA

2 MARIO KART 8 DELUXE

3 CALL OF DUTY:

What are you playing currently?

BLACK OPS COLD WAR

I’ve recently started Watch Dogs: Legion and that’s going alright, but I’m still consistently playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons as well.

What’s the best thing about working in games at JB?

4 ASSASSIN’S CREED VALHALLA

I’ve been in the games section for my entire JB career and have loved every moment of it. Being able to talk about your passions with like-minded customers, or sharing reviews of a game you’ve both played is such a rewarding experience.

5 NBA 2K21

6 ANIMAL CROSSING: NEW HORIZONS

7 JUST DANCE 2021

What’s your earliest video gaming memory?

8 MINECRAFT

What would be your desert island console?

My very first gaming memory was an awful computer game that my grandad put on my big Windows 95 PC. It was a game where you’d slingshot cats as they walked across a brick wall – I’m glad my gaming tastes and choices have expanded since then!

9 SUPER MARIO 3D ALL-STARS

If we’re speaking logistically, the PS2 had overheating issues which would keep me warm at night, but the Switch makes the most sense for entertainment. In portable mode, I would be able to move around the island to avoid direct sun.

10 THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: BREATH OF THE WILD

GAME CHANGERS! A YEAR IN GAMING Even if you weren’t interested, there was no escaping video games by the turn of the decade. Atari had company at home, while arcades were bulging with new and exciting games that delivered whole new concepts, and a very hungry yellow thing... 1980

On May 22, a new star was born. Yellow, rotund and with a voracious appetite for dots and assorted foodstuffs – oh, and blue ghosts – Pac-Man (nee Puck Man, but that was too easily altered…) became an instant sensation. Namco’s aim to create a game with mass appeal paid off, and it has since become the highest-grossing arcade game ever (plus it introduced cutscenes – yay?).

“You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.” So began the home computer interactive fiction genre, with Zork I: The Great Underground Empire . Wholly text-based, it pushed players to exercise their imaginations, while also trying to solve often infuriating puzzles.

When Nintendo game designer Gunpei Yokoi created the first handheld video game, we doubt he knew how big they’d become. Sure, the Game & Watch only boasted a 4-bit brain, but from the initial Ball through to 1991’s widescreen Mario the Juggler , they were fiendishly addictive – and sold over 43 million units worldwide before Game Boy took over.

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