STACK #214 August 2022

THIS MONTH at

GAMING FEATURE

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STACK’s ROVING REPORTER

BEST SELLERS at

What’s your all-time favourite game series?

JULY 2022

The God of War series. I absolutely love being a bad-ass demigod taking their frustration out on the Greek and Norse gods. It’s a great mix of storytelling, interesting locations and over the top gore!

DAVID BROWN @ JB Hi-Fi Chirnside Park, VIC

1 F1 22

2 NINTENDO SWITCH SPORTS

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

Getting excited about all the new products that we have come in, then learning about those products and getting to impart that knowledge onto the customers. Making sure they go away with the right item for them, and seeing a great big smile on their face for a job well done.

What have you been playing lately?

3 XENOBLADE CHRONICLES 3

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on PS5 – it has that classic platformer/nostalgic vibe like the previous generations of gaming. It’s colourful, zany and a lot of fun – plus it looks absolutely stunning on an LG 48” OLED!

4 MARIO KART 8 DELUXE

5 LEGO STAR WARS:

What’s your earliest video gaming memory?

THE SKYWALKER SAGA

King’s Quest by Sierra on the PC with my dad. We had to load DOS and input the right command just to load up the floppy disk. Then we had to write a manual as we went along to be able to solve the puzzles for future playthroughs or if we killed ourselves and had to start all again, as there were no game saves after death back then.

What would be your desert island console?

6 ANIMAL CROSSING: NEW HORIZONS

I’d say my PC, as I do a lot of sim racing on it and think it would be a great setting to look out over your desert island while racing intensely in a Subaru WRX.

7 MINECRAFT

8 KIRBY AND THE

Minecraft – world beyond poster

Minecraft – red poster

Minecraft – mobbery poster

MERCH MONTH of the

FORGOTTEN LAND

Super Mario – characters poster

9 TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA

TURTLES: SHREDDER’S REVENGE

10 MARIO STRIKERS: BATTLE LEAGUE FOOTBALL

1997

GAME CHANGERS! A YEAR IN GAMING While the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 consoles got down to serious business, backed up with several top-notch game releases, SEGA were concentrating on opening something quite big in Sydney…

Japanese racing game fans got a nice Christmas present to go with their traditional KFC dinners in the form of Polyphony Digital’s PlayStation masterpiece Gran Turismo , originally subtitled The Real

Arriving two years after the James Bond movie of the same name, there wasn’t much expected from GoldenEye 007 on Nintendo 64. Then people got to play it… A first-person shooter with a dedicated single player campaign, it combined shooting and stealth as the player stepped into the shoes of Bond, James Bond, to save London and the world from an economic meltdown. While that was super-fun, what really sold the game was the split-screen multiplayer, where up to four players could get their deathmatch on in various scenarios. Highly-awarded, it’s now seen as an important

With the Mega Drive just deleted and the Saturn failing to take off outside of Japan, it may have seemed a strange time to open a bespoke SEGA-themed amusement centre in the

heart of Sydney. However, on March 6, 1997 SEGAWorld opened at Darling Harbour, with a lot of Sonic the Hedgehog themed bits and bobs, the requisite plethora of arcade games and a selection of larger attractions that mostly eschewed any of SEGA’s many top-notch IPs. There was, however, the Sonic Live in Sydney musical, featuring Eggman crashing into, and subsequently trying to take over, Sydney. SEGA World closed in November 2000, and the striking red building was demolished in 2008.

Racing Simulator . That was a bold claim, but the racer – which took five years to develop – delivered, offering realistic (for the time) racing in either arcade or more simulation-based modes. Still one of the highest ranked racers of all time, there were 140 real-world vehicles to collect and race on 11 tracks (22 counting their reversed variants). Aussies finally got to join in the fun in May of 1998.

ground zero in the evolution of multiplayer shooters on consoles.

22 AUGUST 2022

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