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.
Danganronpa-style aesthetics and humour combined with Texas Hold ‘Em poker? Why yes, I did jump into All in Abyss: Judge the Fake without a second thought. Short of adding in strip poker mechanics (oh the nostalgia for the days when PC gaming was inundated with those), this, right here, is exactly the kind of poker game I want to play.…
There is a very fine line between homage and something that is just outright theft of an idea. A good example of the former is Wargroove, which is clearly inspired by Intelligent Systems’ Advance Wars, but has its own identity through storytelling, unit design, features, presentation and so on. On…
What if Harry Potter was an otome love game and not written…
I wrote this article for an arts publication – unfortunately, at the…
Oh I wish the voice actors working on Persona 5 Tactica knew how to pronounce “Marie” properly. Marie is the antagonist of the game (or at least the first chunk of it), and every time any of the cast pronounces her name I want to take a cheese grater to…
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Nintendo’s WarioWare series has represented the company at its whimsical purest since the Game Boy Advance. Players play through hundreds of micro-games, each a few seconds long, in rapid-fire succession. With every minigame being a microcosm of pure and unfiltered creativity, WarioWare has always boasted vivacious energy and charm in…
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If you polled the Star Ocean fan base on which is the finest in this relatively obscure but long-running sci-fi/fantasy series, Star Ocean 2 would pop up quite often, if not in most cases. I would personally argue that Star Ocean 3: Till the End of Time is slightly more…
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Hello Kitty and Friends Happiness Parade was meant to be out much, much earlier in the year. It had even briefly appeared on some eShop storefronts around the world. Something must have been wrong with it, however, as it was unceremoniously pulled and put back into development for some months.…
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Microsoft is going to stop you from using your favourite third-party “unauthorised” controller. From November 12, any effort to circumvent Microsoft’s complete control over the way that you play your games will be met with “error 0x82d60002.” Yep. It wasn’t enough that Microsoft is buying every developer and publisher, and…
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There’s a certain end of the video game industry that mistakes emotional manipulation for quality narrative. The goal is to find the right voice actors, get the players invested enough in the world that they spend a lot of time in it, and then make sure those key scenes are…
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Archetype Arcadia has an awful lot of content. The PR material claims 50 hours, and while I have a gut feeling that that’s assuming a fairly slow reading speed, I read quickly and I wouldn’t be surprised if I did actually spend that long getting to the end. It’s generally…
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Inescapable: No Rules, No Rescue is not the Danganronpa clone it seems to be. It looks the part, but rather than being a “death game,” it’s closer to the first 90% of Lord of the Flies (the part where there’s tension but no murder) than Saw. Or Blue Lagoon were…
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Remember that time Sony’s head suit, Jim Ryan, got up and said “…the PS1 and the PS2 games, they looked ancient, like why would anybody play this?” The Metal Gear Solid Collection shows just how genuinely shallow and unintelligent that statement was. You should want to play the Metal Gear…
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Unfortunately for Crymachina, NieR: Automata exists, and so as a concept “post-apocalyptic world where robots ask existential questions about what it’s like to be human,” is probably a theme that should be scratched from all other developers’ brainstorming sessions. Despite that very prudent advice, the team that took on Crymachina…
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