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.
Brigandine is one of those cult franchises that you don’t really expect to be on any development radar, but every so often someone dusts it off because there is a tiny core out there and there’s not much else really scratching the itch. The original Brigandine was a PlayStation 1 release, and then in 2020 there was the excellent Brigandine:…
“Cry to save the world,” “’Classmate’ (i.e. breed) to save the world,” “Defeat a person’s deviances (sorry ‘distorted desires’) to save the world,” “Sing to save the world.” The JRPG genre is positively filled with these abstract ideas of turning a certain emotion or action into a mechanic to build…
My favourite Serious Sam title to date is the PlayStation 2/GameCube spinoff,…
As someone who travels around enough that I like to think of…
Here’s the problem with playing a single-player spinoff from a multiplayer property: If you don’t particularly care about the multiplayer that the franchise is built on, the single player, where developers will almost always double down on the various in-fanbase jokes, aesthetics, characters and themes, is really not going to…
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Look, the Nippon Professional Baseball league – the NPB – is just better than the MLB. I don’t mind if you disagree, but you’re wrong. From the personality of the teams to the quality of the games, the way the league is organised, and the atmosphere when you’re actually there,…
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What happens when you take Monopoly and Magic: The Gathering and smoosh them together? Culdcept. Culdcept is what happens. It’s perhaps a marriage between two very different genres of board game that no one really asked for, but the series has been around since 1997 and the Sega Saturn, so…
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Granblue Fantasy: Relink was one of the more surprising JRPGs in recent years. This is partly because the game had a notoriously troubled development cycle, yet turned out to be excellent (generally, if something takes eight years and multiple different developers to finish, it’s going to be terrible). It’s also…
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I knew that I was in for a mighty slog when the tutorial of Sword Art Online: Echoes of Aincrad, felt like it went for an hour all by itself. What a winding, long-winded, slow-paced dungeon that was. And then the game opens up to become a massive… long-winded, slow-paced…
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Digimon is doomed to forever walk in Pokémon’s shadow. Part of the issue is the obvious similarities in the names, but on a superficial pass there are more similarities than that, and Digimon doesn’t always do itself favours there. Both games feature cute anime monsters, but Pokémon’s artists come up…
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The Blood of Dawnwalker is the latest RPG from Europe. I know that this is a hugely trite thing to write on the surface, but my first impression was overwhelmingly that this new title is dripping in the heritage of everything from Gothic to Witcher, Greedfall to Banishers. And I’m…
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There is a comfortable lie at the heart of almost every open-world RPG. The idea that the world is ending (or some other equally dramatic events are unfolding), but all of it is waiting on you to stop it and save the day. The Blood of Dawnwalker, the debut title…
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When the SmartFit EQ Adjustable Multi-Angle Laptop Stand landed on my desk to review, I was actually pretty excited, as I did need a laptop stand to improve my posture. Then I wondered how I was actually going to cover this thing for a gaming website. But! Much as with…
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To review the Gothic 1 Remake, I played it side-by-side with the original Gothic, as released on the Nintendo Switch. One hour in the remake, one in the original. Then back to the remake. I did that because Gothic is, in its own little way, an enormously influential classic. It…
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