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.
I am a firm believer that as many video games, be they popular, good, bad, and loathed, should be preserved as possible. All these retro collections that have been released by publishers to cash in on their classic properties (and undermine the value of emulation and the second-hand market) have been both good for the publisher’s business model, and the…
Welcome to Digitally Downloaded’s weekly catch-up news feature, the catch-up coffee. Here, I bring you the best news you may have missed from last week. Grab the biggest mug you’ve got, fill it with your favourite brew, and catch up with us (and our favourite news anchor, Dee Dee)!…
Nintendo’s timing with its no-pressure comfort food games has been fortuitous. Animal…
For people who enjoyed the vibes of Monster Hunter, but found the…
DDNet contributor, Alex Kidman, recently took a trip to Japan and, out of incredible jealousy, we asked him to drop us a couple of stories of highlights from his trip. Here’s his first! Wander the streets of Akihabara, and you’re beset on all sides by anime, video games and, increasingly,…
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For some decades now, wrestling game fans have been seriously limited in game choice, with only titles produced around the dominant brand, WWE – such as WWE 2K23 easily available to Western audiences. However, the publisher of WWE made a huge misstep with WWE 2K20, dropping Japanese developer, Yukes, in…
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Ever since I first laid eyes on Bullfrog’s classic Theme Park, I’ve been equally smitten by theme park simulators and also terrified of what they make me do. Don’t get me wrong; the classic blend of management simulation – like it or not, you’re more or less balancing an Excel…
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There’s absolutely no shortage of affordably-priced gaming headsets on the market. For not that much money, you can pick up a wired set with some kind of flexible microphone, a braided cord and an aggressive-looking logo on the earcups. Which is all well and great, but I have a very…
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Puzzle Bobble is an amazing puzzle game. I use that tense specifically because it’s one of those concepts where the developers got it absolutely plumb right from the get-go, all the way back in 1996. Yes, that was a long time ago. But I’m right. Fire up a copy of…
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There’s no way I can start this article without acknowledging that professional wrestling, the one “sport” that I properly follow, is a staged performance. “Fake” is often thrown around, but that’s not entirely accurate when you’re talking about a performance that can involve being thrown off a ladder through a…
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Annual sports game refreshes all tend to get a little stale over time, but few have had such a fall from grace as we saw out of 2K Games’ WWE line of games back with WWE2K20. The shift from Japanese developer, Yukes, to US Studio, Visual Concepts, led to one…
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I am, in many ways, the worst possible person to review a Raiden game. It’s not because I hate the series, or can’t appreciate the beauty of a vertical shmup. Quite the reverse. I’ve loved Raiden ever since the first time I lined up a 20c piece against a grubby…
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Wonder Boy is one of those classic gaming icons that you’ve probably encountered at some point in your gaming life, whether it’s the classic arcade game or the more recent remakes of titles such as Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap. I say “recent”, and then I look it up…
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Gaming history is important – if you don’t think so, you’re reading the wrong site, I fear – but all too often, collections of important gaming archives boil down largely just to dull lists of simply emulated games, robbing them of their all-important context. It’s the cultural equivalent of displaying…
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