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Review by Matt S. 

Until I played Contrast I wasn't interested in it. That changed about three minutes after I started playing. This is a deeply intelligent game, and yet another example of a wonderfully emerging class of games that maintain artistic credibility while also offering genuine production values. Rain, Shelter, Papo & Yo and now Contrast; it has been a good year for serious gamers indeed.

Review by Matt S.

I sat in the middle of a ring of stones, on the top of an icy mountain. Roughly humanoid in shape these menhirs told no story of their own, and so I was left to sit there and puzzle over them. And so I sat, with nothing but the freezing wind to keep me company.

At length I decided to descend from my perch to explore the world beneath me. I approached a tree, and the noise started. At first it was one note, but as I made my way into a thick forest of pink leaves that one note became a cocophony, somehow jarring and at the same time serene. This soundscape was my own; I created it through my own movement, and that sensation of ownership connected me to the unique soundtrack that only I would ever hear.

Opinion by Matt S.

Getting this out of the way from the outset: I haven't played Call Of Duty: Ghosts. There's no review that's going to go live on Digitally Downloaded once the embargo lifts, and I've got no inclination to buy the game.

I've played previous Call Of Duty games, of course, and they consistently disappoint me. Not because they're poorly-made games. They're quite clearly made well, or they wouldn't sell in the kinds of numbers they do.

Rather, my objection to Call Of Duty is on the basis of what it tells us about the development of the games industry. For the past week or so my Twitter feed and social aggregate sites like N4G have been filled with stories about whether the game looks better on one platform than the other, screenshot comparisons, and so on and so forth. The analysis of the game's technical merits, right down to fish and dogs, can actually be impressively detailed. And that's the problem.

Feature by Matt S.

Suehiro Hidetaka is better known as SWERY (or Swery65), and his claim to fame is producing a game that is so polarising that it is officially recognised in the Guiness Book of Records as the game that critics gave the widest range of scores to.

Article by Matt S.

At 352 pages, the Deadly Premonition Visual Companion is an essential purchase for anyone who is a fan of Swery's polarising horror game.

Okay... that title could be seen as misleading - it's Persona 4 Arena, with an update for the arcade first (they still have those in Japan, believe it or not), but later the PS3 and Xbox 360.

I was able to get some hands-on time with Tecmo Koei and Keiji Inafune's upcoming Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z. It's a game that didn't really appeal to me beforehand - it's another zombie game, after all.

But then I started to play and something happened. I played for five minutes, put the controller down, pulled out my phone and navigated over to Wikipedia. I just could not believe that Goichi Suda wasn't involved in this game. And he isn't, but it still surprises me that he isn't. From that moment on I was interested; its fair to say of all the Japanese developers out there Suda is the one I respect most for his taste in surrealism and subversive art, and any game that is able to successfully emulate what Suda does has my undivided attention.

Article by Matt S.

For someone so often referred to as ‘outspoken,’ French-born game designer and the mind behind Heavy Rain and the upcoming Beyond: Two Souls, David Cage, is remarkably softly spoken.

Sitting in a small conference room with nothing but the air conditioning humming in the background his quiet and measured answers to questions demand attention, lest the words be lost. Back in the office typing up his comments for this feature I discovered it was difficult to catch a couple of thing he said, despite the microphone being placed square in front of him on the table.

He’s also modestly confident. Despite the memorable success of Heavy Rain, and despite being the driving force for one of Sony’s most valuable developer partners, Cage is sure of the games he would like to develop, but shrugs off any suggestion that he is on the same path of innovative approach to game design that has made Miyamoto, Molyneux and Kojima near-household names within the games community.

The idea that games can be art continues to be a problematic one when it comes time to actually discuss games as art. The issue I've seen over and over is that any game that dares to push boundaries and ask questions of its audience tends to be derided rather than being lauded for taking artistic risks. Case in point: Killer is Dead.

All these years later, there's still a lot of chatter about Minecraft around the Internet, and indeed it still sells like hotcakes; it's sitting right at the top of the retail sales charts in some regions and on many iOS app stores it has settled comfortably into a permanent top-5 spot.

Pokemon has proven to be one of Nintendo's most endearing franchises over the years, with fans of all ages enjoying the combination of RPG elements with critter collection. Game Freak will be releasing Pokemon X and Y for the Nintendo 3DS in North America, Europe and Japan on October 12, 2013.

It surprises me that it took Nintendo so long to do this; from the day that the Wii U was announced I thought that an Art Academy game would be the perfect way to show off the console's unique features.

And I was right. Unlike Nintendo's other heavy-hitter Wii U games so far; New Super Mario Bros. and Pikmin 3, Art Academy SketchPad would not be possible on any other device except the 3DS, and completely uniquely for Nintendo, it's also a game that the Wii U does fundamentally better than anything Nintendo has produced for the 3DS.

Apparently this isn't exploitive. Oh Internet, you be so quaint and old-fashioned some times.

I can't say any of the following chain of events surprised me. Dragon's Crown gets released, and gets a positive write up from IGN, Gamespot and other sites who see it as their duty to simply tell audiences whether a game is fun or not.

Polygon takes the game, and because Polygon has a slightly more academic bent to it, the writer charged with reviewing the game decides that the objectification that is rampant in the game and not really debatable by anyone who understands what "objectification" means, gives the game a lower score.

Kaboom.