Matt S. is the Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of DDNet. He's been writing about games for over 20 years, including a book, but is perhaps best-known for being the high priest of the Church of Hatsune Miku.
I don’t often write about films these days, but I recently saw something at the Japan Film Festival in Australia that was powerful, profound, and haunting enough that it has since occupied all my thinking. Kokuho, directed by one of Japan’s most noteworthy art film directors, Lee Sang-il, is, as we enter an era where AI is undermining the very…
The SteelSeries Arctis Nova Elite is a good headset. This is by far the most uncontroversial thing I’ve ever written at DigitallyDownloaded.net, because with a price tag of AU$1350, you would hope that it’s a good headset. SteelSeries has packed as much sound quality as possible into this thing and,…
Disclaimer: I’m making this quick disclaimer so it’s clear and up-front. I…
Kirby Air Riders is fun. It’s not any more than that, and…
If you were to try and narrow the entire range of TCGs out there down to the “big three”, you’d surely land on Magic the Gathering, Pokemon TCG, and Yu-Gi-Oh!. Of those three, Yu-Gi-Oh is the one that has relied the most on console video games to build the fanbase.…
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The best way to learn a new language is to actually practice that language in real-world context. If you travel around Japan you will, at some point, almost certainly be accosted at least once by a group of school kids who are clutching a workbook and told to practice their…
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Kotaro Uchikoshi will be remembered as one of the finest writers to work in the visual novel (and VN-adjacent) space. He is of course best known for the Zero Escape series and, more recently, the two utterly exceptional AI titles. Right at the start of his career, however, he worked in…
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Two rugby games have been released within a span of a week of one another. For such a niche sport (in the world of video games), I’m not sure that was in anyone’s greatest interest, but nonetheless rugby fans get a choice: Jonah Lomu Rugby Challenge 4 is a sequel…
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We’re being spoiled for Musou right now! A month after Koei Tecmo released the exceptional Dynasty Warriors Origins, the company went and stealth-dropped Warriors: Abyss as part of a Sony State of Play show. This is an action roguelike heavily inspired by Vampire Survivors and similar “horde” games, and while…
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When a series is known for being as surrealistic as the Yakuza series is, keeping it fresh over the long term is all the more challenging. After all, the oddball stops being oddball when it becomes mundane. Thankfully, to date the developers at Ryu Ga Gotoku have been able to…
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I consider myself pretty well-versed in video games. I’ve reviewed more games on DDNet alone than most people play in a lifetime, after all. I’m also a massive fan of retro games and spend a big chunk of my time playing stuff from the year 2000 and before. So every…
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There’s a literary device called the Deus Ex Machina (no, the game series didn’t invent that cool-sounding word), which describes when an author uses a plot device to solve a seemingly unsolvable problem in a story. It’s possibly the most difficult literary device to use, since, if you calibrate it…
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Civilization VII is disappointing. To be clear, this doesn’t mean it’s not well-made, and I’ve enjoyed it enough, but it represents the most radical change for the series in perhaps its entire history, and as someone who has spent more than 1,000 hours in Civilization VI, not all of these…
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Hello Kitty Island Adventure is such a clever game in so many ways. Superficially, it looks like Animal Crossing, and will no doubt attract a similar audience for that reason. But it’s also a game that has an identity all of its own once you dig beyond the superficial, and…
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