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.
To start this review with something very personal: My father passed away last week. It’s been difficult, to put it mildly. The reason I bring it up is that Dad absolutely loved Ten-Pin Bowling. Had his own ball, ball bag (I had no idea they made bowling ball bags), shoes, the works. He competed in social leagues all over the…
Having not played the original Code Vein, I have no idea whether Code Vein II is effective in building on it, or whether the two games are related at all. What I do know is that Code Vein II is an excellent soulslike. One that starts quite slowly, but has…
It’s incredible that Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergarde plays so well on…
Lached Up Games serves a very specific niche with its quirky and…
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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Reality is increasingly uncertain, and this is fascinating. Anonymous;Code, the latest in the series that has brought us Steins;Gate, Robotics;Notes and Chaos;Head, is a play on this idea, and it, too, is fascinating. Quite possibly the most fascinating of all this series of visual novels, precisely because it is so…
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It’s September already! We recorded this episode well in advance for scheduling reasons, and so some of the things we say in here will be out of date… but we still have a good laugh, despite not knowing what has happened over the last six weeks. So this week we…
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