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 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 payment processors, VISA, Mastercard, and PayPal to force Valve, on…
The third in the now-trilogy that started with AI: The Somnium Files is the first that Kotaro Uchikoshi took a back seat to. He still had a supervisory role, but it’s one of Uchikoshi’s mentees, Kazuya Yamada, who gets the creative credit for this one. The good news is that…
From the period where BioWare (free from EA influence and able to…
Over the last couple of years, payment processors such as Visa, Mastercard…
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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The remake of Romance of the Three Kingdoms VIII is now out in the wild, and it is a very good game. It’s excellent for newcomers while also offering something for the series faithful, all wrapped up in some truly gorgeous art. We were able to send some questions over…
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Remaking strategy games comes across as an odd decision, because strategy games are principally defined and remembered through their mechanics, and that is something that typically improves over time. Take Civilization 2 as an example. It’s my single favourite strategy game of all time, but it would be downright strange…
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