STACK #201 Jul 2021

GAMING FEATURE

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What’s your all-time favourite game series?

The Hitman franchise. The flexibility of mission approaches and AI recognition was second to none in its time, and the reboots are amazing.

JUNE 2021

1 RATCHET & CLANK: RIFT APART

NATHAN FISCHER @ JB Hi-Fi Carindale, QLD

What have you been playing lately?

2 MARIO KART 8 DELUXE

I am currently lynching lycans in Resident Evil Village , racing around the Forza series on the Logitech G923 wheel, and going toe-to-toe with toxicity on my go-to online multiplayer game of choice, Rainbow Six Siege .

3 MARIO GOLF: SUPER RUSH

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

4 ANIMAL CROSSING: NEW HORIZONS

Getting hands-on with all the new gaming hardware. Promo games are awesome, but I really enjoy hearing how new headsets sound and how new keyboards and mice handle.

5 NBA 2K21

What would be your desert island console?

6 SUPER MARIO 3D WORLD

Logistically, given there’s no such thing as a coconut powered console, probably a Switch. I mean, on the proviso I could get my hands on a solar-powered battery pack to then charge the unit. However, assuming there’s a fully functional power station on this island, then an Xbox Series X, given its backwards compatibility with every other Xbox, it’s four consoles in one!

7 JUST DANCE 2021

What’s your earliest video gaming memory?

8 FIFA 21

Playing Super Mario Kart with family at Christmas sometime in the early 1990s (thanks for the “Jeez how old am I?” reality check!) and sprinkle in some four-player Goldeneye on the Nintendo 64 in the late ’90s.

9 MINECRAFT

10 NEW POKÉMON SNAP

1984

GAME CHANGERS! A YEAR IN GAMING Generally, the video games market was still in the doldrums, but the home computer revolution – especially the super-successful Commodore 64 here in Australia – was going great guns. Meanwhile, the arcade game designers weren’t quite down for the count yet… S peaking of Epyx, they unleashed a ground-breaking platform puzzler for the K onami’s S omewhere in Russia – more

creative types were firing in 1984, and managed to nail down a genre in the sporting arena that persists to this day in Track & Field , which was

specifically the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow – a talented boffin named Alexey Pajitnov was busy creating puzzling diversions on the Electronika 60

Commodore 64 in ’84 that blew people away, not just with truly top-notch spy craft gameplay and incredibly animated graphics, but with its use of (then) incredible digitised speech. It floored people when they were first greeted with Professor Elvin Atombender’s rather sibilant “Another visitor… Stay a while, stay forever!”, not to mention the fab “Destroy him my robots!”, and the “AARGH!” of your player dying.

quickly followed by Hypersports . Rather than just centring on one

computer. In June of 1984 he nailed his finest achievement, Tetris , which soon had everybody who played it addicted. Adapted to the IBM PC, copies leaked to the west and Russia soon managed to invade the homes of puzzle addicts the world over… and that was before it came packed with Nintendo’s Game Boy!

sport like previous games, they grouped a selection together, as varied as running and hammer throw in the former to swimming and shooting in the latter. Home software people took note, in particular Epyx, who gave us plenty of joystick waggling action soon after with the likes of Summer and Winter Games .

JULY 2021

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