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.
Tamagotchi are one of those iconic things that you just hope hands around forever. The little devices that you pin to your backpack or carry around in your pocket for micro-distractions throughout the day are wholesome and charming. You’d be lucky if you spent more than five minutes with your little virtual “pet” per day, cleaning it and playing the…
Hideo Kojima is the video game industry’s big auteur. The Stanley Kubrick of games. The guy who somehow gets a big budget to make his strange experiments, even when they defy the industry best practice, and as we all know, the games industry is very best practice orientated. It’s all…
2025 has been an exceptional year for releases, almost from the first…
How do you “guarantee” 60 million clicks on a mouse? I get…
It’s easy to wonder why Square Enix would go to such great effort to remake one of the oldest Dragon Quest titles. After all, the HD-2D engine they’ve applied to Dragon Quest III would have made the SNES trilogy positively sparkle, and those titles are far more renowned for their…
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For the first time the now-iconic Yakuza series is on a Nintendo platform. To an extent you could question just who this port of Yakuza Kiwami is for, as it is obviously a drop down in fidelity over what is available elsewhere. On the other hand, this has been an…
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SteelSeries makes exceptional audio equipment. Whether it’s the headsets, speakers or microphones, the bulk of what I use for both listening to and creating audio has the little circular logo-thing on it, whatever that’s meant to be. One thing I didn’t have previously was something truly portable, for my Switch…
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After ten years there’s finally a new Dragon Age game. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the biggest disappointments of the year. So we dig into that a bit, looking at where things went to wrong and what the game really should have been. We also look at the newly-released Nintendo…
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First and foremost, Dragon Age: The Veilguard isn’t a Dragon Age game. It doesn’t look like one, it doesn’t play like one, and while there are cameos that superficially resemble the heroes of the original series, it doesn’t tell a story like one either. Unlike actual Dragon Age titles, it’s…
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Writing horror is a tough gig. It’s challenging for writers to create and maintain fear and tension. Horror needs to be character-driven and it needs to make the audience care about the horrible things that are happening to those characters. Meanwhile, it’s difficult for visual artists because even the slightest…
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Ys isn’t the oldest JRPG property out there, but it’s one of them, and it’s also one of the most prolific. If you ignore all the re-releases and just concentrate on the main series, there is just one period where there was a substantial hiatus (1996-2002). Otherwise, the longest fans…
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At some point, someone sat down and decided to make an RPG which would be narrative-heavy, but it would be almost entirely emergent narrative. Where every plot direction and key moment was a consequence of the player’s actions. Where characters and their personalities would be entirely defined by player decisions,…
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On the one hand, the people behind I*CHU: Chibi Edition have done the world a big favour. The developers and publishers (PQube in the West) have taken a mobile gacha game that was effectively killed a half-decade ago and given players the opportunity to enjoy it in its full glory…
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Dance is a difficult subject to tackle, for many reasons. These challenges are, fundamentally, why it’s not a topic that video game developers typically touch (or filmmakers, or novelists, or painters, or most other art forms). The Ukrainian developer behind Light de Deux has given a ballet-themed visual novel a…
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