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.
Bandai Namco unveiled the second title in its anime soulslike property, Code Vein II, during all the announcements and “Direct” game shows last week. Just recently they sat us down to watch (sadly, not play) a small snippet of the game and it is looking pretty impressive. It’s hard to try and co-exist in a genre that has Elden Ring…
It’s incredible to think that Bravely Default: Flying Fairy is 13 years old at this point. It feels like it was just yesterday that it was turning heads as a new spin on the JRPG genre and a brilliant homage to Final Fantasy in particular (Flying Fairy as the subtitle…
To put this review very simply: The Nintendo Switch is my favourite…
It’s been a difficult few years for Level-5, from the highs of…
I’m not going to lie. My nose will grow. Lies Of P infuriates me to play. Of all the ways to approach the Soulslike “hard game”, this is the least suited to my preferences. I understand that there will be an audience for it, but that’s not me, it won’t…
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Nakano Broadway is not a place you want to go if you have residual concerns about large numbers of people in enclosed spaces. As amusing as it is that there are signs up all over the place recommending “social distancing,” and while the Japanese tend to be better sports about…
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It feels good to be home. It might be sauna-hot (despite being well into Autumn now, the sticky humidity of Japan’s summers has stuck around), and I’m tired as everything having done my usual thing of taking the overnight flight and then failing to sleep at all, but I’m back…
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It would be easy to dismiss Monochrome Mobius as being a “too-traditional” JRPG, turn-based warts and all. Indeed, that is what far too many other critics have done when covering this game, and that’s doing it a disservice. It seems that just about everyone has missed what makes this a…
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Here’s a tale of two very different sides of the games industry for you. On the one hand, I was recently given an hour-long look into The Plucky Squire, an upcoming Devolver Digital-published game about a character that can pop into and out of the “real world” from a book,…
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Got a Nintendo Switch? At some stage you’ve probably taken it out in public. After all, gaming on the go is very much the point of that thing. But would you necessarily want other people to know what you’re playing? That’s the topic for this podcast discussion: the games we…
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We’ve all had this experience at one stage or another: We’ve been playing a game that we totally love and thing it will be one of our favourites… only for it to ultimately disappoint us. What causes that, and why? That’s the topic for this part of the September 2023…
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You know how the saying goes: “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.” I do feel both very foolish and a great deal of shame for playing Taito Milestones 2. It’s not because this is a retro compilation of poor games. Far from it. The…
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Samba de Amigo is a game of pure joy and high-octane energy (with some acid surely thrown in when it was being developed). It comes across as an even more explosive explosion of colour and humour than Bandai Namco’s excellent Taiko the Drum series. In the party context that this…
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As we start to ramp up towards the end of the year, the release schedule for games is… well, it’s starting to become intimidating. But of course, there’s so much to look forward to that it’s a nice problem to have. Let us know which games you’re looking forward to…
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