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…
Monster Menu: The Scavenger’s Cookbook could have been something special. The premise is really quite clever, but unfortunately, it ends up relying too heavily on the roguelike foundations for that premise to really take flight. Survival is meant to be the core of the thing, and in theory, it reaches…
Read More
The high-end gaming handheld market is really heating up. The Steam Deck kicked the fad off, but it has since been joined by the likes of the Ayaneo series, the Anbernic W600 and, now, the Asus ROG Ally. Despite its ridiculous name, after getting hands-on time with the Ally, I…
Read More
Mishima Yukio is a fascinating figure in Japanese literature. As an author, he is one of the nation’s greats. He was very nearly Japan’s first Nobel Prize for Literature recipient, being nominated three times, and was ultimately only overlooked because his mentor, Kawabata Yasunari, won the prize instead. He also…
Read More
Very, very rarely does a game get made about the Tokugawa Shogunate. There are thousands of games about the Sengoku wars that came immediately before, and there are plenty made about the end of the Shogunate as well. The 250 years in the middle, however, are largely blank (at least,…
Read More
It’s unclear to me what audience LEGO 2K Drive is intended for. It’s very capable at what it does, but it also seems to be an effort to shove a whole lot of best practice big game stuff into a package, and in doing so comes across as a little…
Read More
Since AFL 23 launched a week ago, patches have been released nearly every day. The game was released in a poor state (note: as I noted in that article, I have in the past worked with Big Ant, the developer of the game, though I have not had any association…
Read More
I joke frequently about how I’ve never made it off the tutorial plateau of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, so it’s just as well that you don’t need to have played that game to get stuck into Tears of the Kingdom (though I’m sure it helps). Tears…
Read More
One of the interesting things about this year has been the contrast between AAA-remakes (think Resident Evil 4) that have been really very good, and the original games (think Redfall or Forspoken) that have been terrible. So we discuss what might be the cause of this on the podcast. Is…
Read More
I am surprised that Koei Tecmo and Gust decided to remake Atelier Marie. It is the original Atelier title, so there’s historical value in it, of course, but following the success of the Ryza series, which brought a new legion of fans to the series, I would have bet for…
Read More
Final Fantasy XVI is just around the corner now, and we are so incredibly excited for it. While we wait, though, we’ve been playing through some of the classic Final Fantasies courtesy of the pixel remaster. This is what has inspired this part of our podcast this month. We remember…
Read More