Alex Kidman is an award-winning Australian journalist with more than 20 years games and tech writing experience under his belt. Critics have accused him of being a heartless and relentless word-writing machine, but this is clearly false. Alex will deal with those critics once he's finished his latest software upgrade.
Today’s Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream Direct highlights Mii character creation with new customization parts, island building, player-created items, and more. It also announces a mid-April launch date. This is the first new entry in the Tomodachi Life series in more than 10 years.…
Developer Cygnus Cross has announced an Early Access release window of (Northern) summer 2026 for ARPG and town/farm sim Emberville. For the gameplay, think Diablo-lite meets Stardew Valley. The game goes beyond traditional “farm and fight” games with a simple (yet deep) combat system, an inherited skill levelling system, and…
Koei Tecmo and Team Ninja have dropped a large amount of new…
To start this review with something very personal: My father passed away…
The movie tie-in game is something of a dying art, but in many ways you would have to rule it death by way of suicide. The very model for movie games ensured that they would die out. This was never terribly surprising; classically speaking, lots of money got spent getting…
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Bubble Bobble is one of the greatest games ever made, and it’s also my go-to game when I’ve been asked about my favourite game of all time. Taito’s certainly done some interesting things with the Bubble Bobble IP over the years, and while a lot of the spinoff games have…
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Ball x Pit is excellent. Can I end this review now? No? The editor guy, Matt, is telling me to do my job before I can go back to playing, so I guess not (yeah, I’m a total dictator like that – ed.) Dammit. Very well then. Conceptually, Ball x…
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There are few things that I enjoy more than a good retro games collection. Sure, emulation exists and it’s not going anywhere any time soon, but as someone who creates for a living, I do like the idea of supporting other creators by actually buying their creations. In the retro…
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Amongst the pantheon of games, if you ask DigitallyDownloaded.net editor, Matt, which is the greatest, he’ll often reply that it’s Toaplan’s 1990 platformer Snow Bros, inspired (cough) by titles such as Taito’s sublime Bubble Bobble. Yeah, I sit with a different capture-and-break-enemies platformer as the greatest game of all time,…
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The games we play when we’re young absolutely do shape our appreciation of gaming when we’re older. If you had asked me when I was about 14 what the best game in the world was, the answer would have been easy. Bubble Bobble, and obviously that’s still scientifically true, but…
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The recent passion for retro remakes has seen a whole host of titles updated and refreshed, though with mixed results – I’m still stinging from the disappointment of Bubble Bobble 4 Friends and maintain that Snow Bros Wonderland isn’t much of an upgrade over the original, really, even though clearly…
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Snow Bros. Wonderland is an all-new game in the classic arcade series that we never thought we’d see after the orginial publisher, Toaplan, closed up shop many years ago. And yet here it is. DDNet regular, Alex, and I, have a bit of a difference of opinion about the merits…
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Crayon Shin Chan has been around since 1990, and I’ve been aware of his existence for nearly that long. However, being honest, I’ve largely steered clear of his adventures, mostly because the pitch here is for a younger audience that will appreciate his mix of youthful naivety mixed with a…
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Of all the games produced for the Simple 2000 series of budget Japanese PS2 titles, none has had quite the same resonance or longevity as D3’s Earth Defense Force series. I’m unashamedly a fan of most of the EDF games – as long as we can all agree that Insect…
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