Aaron Souppouris

Editor-in-Chief

Aaron Souppouris has been writing about design, technology, video games and culture for more than a decade. (Like, way more – his first feature was published on Gaming Age in 1998.) After three years at The Verge, Aaron moved to Engadget in 2014 as a senior editor, reporting on everything from VR to immortal bacteria, before becoming features editor in 2017. As features editor, he ran a small team that won a Society for Features Journalism award in 2019 for its profile of Impossible Foods. After five years as Executive Editor, Aaron became Editor-in-Chief of Engadget in 2025.

Articles by Aaron Souppouris

'Pokémon Sword' and 'Shield' offer an excellent but familiar adventure
It would be unfair to suggest that the Pokémon games have stagnated. The last generation, which began with 2016's Sun and Moon, genuinely mixed things up, discarding the gyms and formulaic storytelling for an island-hopping adventure with an actual plot. It's strange, then, that much of the hype around the upcoming Sword and Shield has been about fresh starts, new eras and major overhauls. In the context of those expectations, Sword and Shield are a disappointment. By every other metric, though, they're fantastic games.
NVIDIA's GTX 1650 and 1660 Super are two very different GPU upgrades
Following the release of its "Super" RTX 2060, 2070 and 2080 GPUs, NVIDIA is back with a pair of updated graphics cards: the GeForce GTX 1660 Super and GTX 1650 Super. As with the RTX Supers, though, what "Super" means for these new cards is not set in stone. In fact, the two upgrades could barely be more different.
Analogue's $200 Pocket could be the ultimate retro gaming portable
In just eight years, Analogue has transformed itself from a maker of wildly expensive bespoke Neo Geo consoles to a retro gaming giant. Capitalizing on the buzz around Nintendo's Classic Mini NES and the following mini console craze, the Seattle-based company has created premium high-definition consoles based on the NES, SNES and Genesis, all of which have been extremely well received. Today, it's announcing its most ambitious project to date: the Analogue Pocket.
Get ready for a week of home theater tech on Engadget
The home entertainment industry is in transition. Cable companies are reacting to Netflix by trying to become Netflix, launching countless streaming services of their own. YouTube, having taken a huge bite out of TV viewing, now counts TV as its fastest-growing platform. Ultra HD Blu-ray, undoubtedly the highest-quality medium to watch movies on at home, has done nothing to stop the ever-growing marketshare of streaming.
Sega is becoming its weird and wonderful self again
Sega is in an unexpectedly good place right now. The company was never on top of the industry; it's been beaten by Nintendo, by Sony, by the decline of the arcade. It spent years nursing the wounds from its fall from grace in the '90s, and through the '00s and early '10s could seemingly do little right.
‘Streets of Rage 4’ is shaping up to be a worthy sequel
Streets of Rage 4's announcement landed with a bit of a thud. The original trilogy of Genesis games is beloved, and for many remains the benchmark for the genre. It's now been 15 years since Streets of Rage 3, and a teaser trailer for a new game showing a cast of hand-drawn characters against some decidedly modern music looked more like a Saturday morning cartoon than a faithful new chapter. While many were excited for the return, a vocal group voiced their concerns.
'Blacksad' is a promising detective game based on a cult comic
Blacksad is a long-running graphic novel series that covers some heavy topics through a noir detective window. Set in the 1950s, it follows hardboiled detective John Blacksad, with each book focusing on a new case. It's one of my favorite series, but there's always been one problem: There's not enough of it. The first book was released in 2000, book five came in 2014 and book six is due to be published "soon" after years of delays. My excitement when a Blacksad video game telling an all-new story was announced, then, was palpable. After playing 45 minutes of Blacksad: Under The Skin today, I'm still excited.
FIFA 20's Volta mode is good enough to be its own game
There's a lot to Volta, FIFA 20's new street soccer mode. Rather than a one-off sideshow to the main game, it's actually multiple offline and online game styles and a full story campaign, rolled into a cohesive and enjoyable package. Off the bat, there are three main game styles, which will be familiar to anyone that's kicked a ball around with friends. You can play with rush keepers (a term for having no defined goalkeeper) in teams of three or four. This style has tiny goals and barely any rules apart from quick free kicks for blatant fouls. Then there's street with keepers, which uses larger futsal goals and dedicated keepers, but is similarly light on rules. The last style is futsal, which plays as you'd expect if you've ever watched it: Five-a-side with keepers, kick-ons and corners, on-the-fly substitutions, accumulated fouls leading to penalties and an actual referee who will dish out yellow and red cards. All of the modes ditch the stamina, fatigue and injury systems of the regular game.
'Fire Emblem: Three Houses' is a slice of epic life
This article contains no story details, beyond those revealed in the game's official trailers. There is discussion of some mechanics and procedural details yet to be shown by Nintendo. Fire Emblem: Three Houses is the game Fates should have been. Developer Intelligent Systems has made a lot of tweaks to its formula for the series' first outing on the Nintendo Switch, and the result of those changes is a game that marries Fire Emblem's dual personalities in a meaningful and satisfying way. If you don't know about Fire Emblem already, a quick primer: It's an almost-three-decade-old tactical RPG franchise from Japan that only came to the West after characters like Roy appeared in Super Smash Bros. Melee on the GameCube. It didn't truly rise to worldwide prominence until the release of Awakening on the 3DS in 2012.
NVIDIA's new RTX Super cards are a pre-emptive strike on AMD
With AMD's next generation of GPUs just days away, NVIDIA is making good on its drawn-out tease with a trio of new graphics cards: the RTX 2060 Super, RTX 2070 Super and the RTX 2080 Super. What does that "Super" mean? Well, there's not a single answer to that.
The Link’s Awakening remake feels exactly like it should
Link's Awakening for Nintendo Switch is a faithful recreation of the original game, except when it's not. Although I remember watching my older brothers playing the original Zelda on their NES, the Game Boy was my first console, and Link's Awakening was my first Zelda. My first RPG, really. I played the game for hours on end, losing myself to the world and its many mysteries. After graduating to bigger and better consoles, I've never returned to Koholint. Until today, when I got a brief look at Nintendo's upcoming remake.
Dynamaxing a corgi in ‘Pokémon Sword' and 'Shield’
Pokémon Sword and Shield, the series' first proper outing on the Switch, is shaking up a tried-and-tested formula. There's the dynamic weather system, which affects which Pokémon can spawn; the free camera, which will completely change the feel of exploration; the new "verticality" to Pokémon hunting; the co-operative Raid battles; the fresh setting, inspired by Great Britain; and a Rotom smartphone that replaces the Pokédex. There's a lot, but very little of it is on show at this year's E3. The demo I played through this afternoon was limited to a section of a water gym. It contained a simple switch-based puzzle, where I turned off and on water jets in order to proceed to the gym leader. One interesting thing was the game's use of a more horizontal camera to lay out the puzzle clearly, but honestly it's the type of challenge that'd be at home in any of the series' many games. It was all very familiar, albeit with a heightened level of graphical flair that the transition away from the 3DS allows for.
The problem with the Galaxy Fold
Take a look at the Galaxy Fold's 68 official images on Samsung's press site, and see if you can work out what's missing. Or watch the promotional clip and tell me what you find odd about it. No, I'm not talking about how weird that tiny outside screen is. Instead, it's the thing Samsung went to painstaking lengths to avoid talking about at is "Unpacked" keynote yesterday. It's an issue facing all folding phones, really: the fold gap.
‘Silksong’ is a full-blown sequel to ‘Hollow Knight’
Hollow Knight was kind of a sleeper hit, at least around these parts. It goes without saying that if we'd given it the appropriate attention, the Kickstarter-funded title would've made our game of the year list when it first came to PC in 2017. Either way, it's definitely one of the best Metroidvania games ever made. And it's getting a sequel.
'Super Mario Maker 2' hits the Switch this June
It took its sweet time, but Super Mario Maker is coming to Nintendo Switch! Far from a port, this is a bonafide sequel, Super Mario Maker 2. Details are scant, but from the brief trailer Nintendo showed during its Nintendo Direct presentation, we noticed some assets from that other superb Wii U game, Super Mario 3D World. The best news? You'll only have to wait a few months to play it: Super Mario Maker 2 will land in June 2019. Expect to hear a lot more about it in the coming months.
Audeze's $99 Bluetooth cable makes iSine headphones 'wireless'
Just after the iPad Pro was announced, I wrote about how sad I was to be forced away from my current pair of headphones, the Audeze iSine 10. You see, iSine models are best paired with a Lightning cable that features Audeze's custom DAC, giving great audio quality -- and the new iPad drops the Lightning port. Well, someone, somewhere, heard my cries, as Audeze is releasing a cable compatible with all iSine models that converts them from Lightning to Bluetooth.
Why the new MacBook Air isn’t ‘a bigger MacBook’
The announcement of the MacBook Air yesterday means that a large portion of Apple's laptops are powered by Intel "Y" processors. The fanless 12-inch MacBook was the first to include one of these low-power chips. The new MacBook Air is the second, but this time Apple is using it quite differently. Because Apple doesn't post model numbers for the processors in its laptops, it's difficult to know what exactly is going on inside them. This is compounded by the fact that the company now has three computers -- the 12-inch MacBook, the entry-level MacBook Pro, and the new Air -- in the same price range, all configurable with "dual-core i5" processors. If you're thinking of buying one of Apple's "cheap" laptops, it's worth knowing what makes them different from one another.
Spare a thought for the guy with Lightning headphones
It was a questionable decision to opt for headphones that work with two devices. Nevertheless, I do love the Audeze iSINE 10s that I've used every day for the past year and a half. Sure, I can't charge and listen to music at the same time, but thanks to a Lightning cable feeding data and power to Audeze's in-line DAC, they sound fantastic on both my iPad and my iPhone. Unfortunately, I'm now stuck with some wonderful headphones that are roughly half as useful as they were yesterday, as Apple has just switched from Lightning to USB-C for its latest iPad Pros.
Overclocking GPUs makes surprisingly great TV
Outside of Engadget's consumer-tech space, there are dozens of sites and YouTube channels that make a living covering PC hardware in extreme depth, looking at every aspect of a new product, tearing it down, examining circuitry and providing more insight than a general-purpose tech publication ever could. I follow a few of these specialists to stay up to date on the latest hardware. These come in a few flavors, from news-and-review websites like Anandtech to entertainment-focused channels like Linus Sebastian's Linus Tech Tips to the ultra-informative PC hardware site and YouTube channel Gamers Nexus.
NVIDIA’s RTX cards are a gamble on the future of gaming
NVIDIA's RTX series of GPUs has been a long time coming. The company's last meaningful hardware revision, the 10 series, came out back in May 2016. And real-time ray-tracing, the intensive rendering technique that RTX cards purportedly make a reality, has been dreamed about for decades. But, although it hasn't dominated the headlines as much, the most important change RTX brings is the shift away from raw power and towards algorithms and AI. But, I'm getting ahead of myself. First, let's have a quick look at what exactly NVIDIA is trying to sell you. Next week, two cards, the $700 RTX 2080 and $1,000 RTX 2080 Ti, will be vying for your cash, followed in October by the RTX 2070, which at $500 is likely to be the best seller of the three.

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