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.
It feels like it’s been a while since I’ve had the excuse to write about the supreme Goddess, Hatsune Miku. SEGA’s gone quiet on video games, and I’ve just not been able to line up a trip to Japan at the same time as the annual concerts over there. Related reading: Our review of Miku Project Diva MegaMix on PC.…
Shinto is one of those things that most people who know anything about Japan have some vague concept of, but don’t really know anything about. From experience, they’re also rarely interested and that’s depressing. Tourists in Japan do cheerfully visit Shinto shrines, before mistaking them for Buddhist temples (and vice…
I’m about to really age myself, but when I was young, the…
Every time I see “Wuthering Waves” I think to myself “wow, they’ve…
Hello readers! It’s that time of month again – magazine publication day! We have a really special edition of the Dee Dee Zine for you this month! Jam-packed into the 56 pages of this issue you’ll find: – Hatsune Miku, the history and future of Japanese idols. – A manga…
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The game of this week has, without a doubt, been Stray. The cyberpunk adventure game about a cat in a world of robots has been winning hearts and minds over, and people haven’t stopped talking about it all week. But the game has caused one other line of discourse to…
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In most cases, I play JRPGs for the narrative. I want to be lost in the characters, setting, plot and world. I like when it’s supported by quality gameplay mechanics, of course, but the frameworks and structures that support that narrative are less of a focus for me than that…
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Pascal’s wager, the philosophical concept, is an excellent thought exercise that considers that humans play a simple game, not unlike the Prisoner’s Dilemma, on whether we should believe God exists. It breaks down like this: If God does not exist, then whether you believe in him or not is irrelevant…
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One of the challenges I have with Koei Tecmo’s Warriors franchise is determining the pecking order of the various games within the series. If you asked me to rank the Final Fantasy series, for example, there’s a clear upper echelon (Final Fantasy XII, Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy VIII), but…
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I’m a big fan of itch.io for the freedom and open platform that it allows for developers to be creative, experimental, and directly canvas the audience for feedback for games that are not yet ready for primetime on Steam and its ilk. In addition, itch.io allows you to be transgressive,…
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Sony’s PlayStation Plus Deluxe subscription service has a big lineup of blockbusters. It also has some amazing games that won’t catch nearly as much attention that are well worth your time. This will be an ongoing regular series where we look at some of the gems that sit outside of…
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Rune Factory 5 is a game that nearly didn’t happen, on account of the Rune Factory developer going bankrupt, and then nothing but crickets on the property being saved for nearly a decade. For that reason, when this against-the-odds new entry in the series launched as a temporary exclusive Switch…
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In recent years, Bandai Namco has been very busy creating special edition Tamagotchis covering just about every fandom you can imagine. I still use keep the batteries in my Pac-Man one fresh. But I might need to retire ol’ friend Pac soon, because there’s a Hatsune Miku Tamagotchi on the…
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Following on from the release of Otoko Cross: Pretty Boys Mahjong Solitaire in May, I’m not going to have too much additional to say about this Klondike Solitaire take on basically the same concept. It’s a game about enormously pretty boys that dress up in girly clothing and then, as…
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