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.
I don’t often write about films these days, but I recently saw something at the Japan Film Festival in Australia that was powerful, profound, and haunting enough that it has since occupied all my thinking. Kokuho, directed by one of Japan’s most noteworthy art film directors, Lee Sang-il, is, as we enter an era where AI is undermining the very…
The SteelSeries Arctis Nova Elite is a good headset. This is by far the most uncontroversial thing I’ve ever written at DigitallyDownloaded.net, because with a price tag of AU$1350, you would hope that it’s a good headset. SteelSeries has packed as much sound quality as possible into this thing and,…
Disclaimer: I’m making this quick disclaimer so it’s clear and up-front. I…
Kirby Air Riders is fun. It’s not any more than that, and…
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…
Read MoreIn 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…
Read MorePascal’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…
Read MoreOne 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…
Read MoreI’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,…
Read MoreSony’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…
Read MoreRune 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…
Read MoreFollowing 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…
Read MoreThere are a few genres that simply don’t age well. A good JRPG is timeless, as are platformers, brawlers, fighting games and SHMUPs or side-scrolling shooters. Sports games and FPSers, however, don’t. With FPSers, if you strip the nostalgia out of even the mighty Doom or Duke Nukem, I would…
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