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.
It seems to take a lifetime for the Trails games to make their way from Japan to the West, even though it’s truthfully less than a couple of years. Delays don’t help, though! The Legend of Heroes: Trails beyond the Horizon follows this pattern; it was originally released in Japan in September 2024. Today, NIS America announced a January 2026…
I never thought I’d use curse words on this website, but this warrants it. Last week, the puritanical SWERF, TERF, anti-women’s autonomy, and anti-LGBT extremist hate group, Collective Shout, was successful in getting Steam to remove hundreds of games that offended its members. It achieved that by putting pressure on…
I’m sorry if my title is a little odd — it’s hard…
To celebrate Odencat’s sixth anniversary, the developer has announced that its short…
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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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Once upon a time… oh, you have heard that one? That’ll be because it’s an absolute standard fantasy trope, setting for a countless number of simple children’s stories told for centuries now. The Plucky Squire absolutely revels in tropes, not only relating…
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It’s been a while since I’ve thought about Popcap’s classic Peggle – and that’s not helped by the series being dormant since 2013 – but I’m willing to bet that back when I did, I never once considered that what Peggle, that classic and relaxing mix of Pachinko and bagatelle…
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Ever since I read my first Moomin book as a child – I dimly think it might have been Comet in Moominland – I’ve been besotted with Tove Jansson’s endlessly fascinating Finnish trolls and their motley crew of quite literally fantastic friends and family. The books have always been the…
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