Aaron Souppouris
Articles by Aaron Souppouris
‘Man of Medan’ could usher in a golden age of horror games
2015's PS4 exclusive Until Dawn is one of the most memorable titles of this generation. It took the bare bones choose-your-own-adventure storytelling of games like The Walking Dead and massively expanded the interactivity, immersion and production values to create a fantastically tropey horror game. Like all horror, it was best experienced in a group, and I've played it several times with various people, taking it in turns to wield the controller, debating every decision. Now, developer Supermassive has moved away from Sony to build a multi-platform successor to Until Dawn called The Dark Pictures Anthology.
‘Sekiro’ continues the work that ‘Bloodborne’ started
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice doesn't represent a seachange from the formula that Dark Souls creator Hidetaka Miyazaki has been refining over the past decade, but it does take that blueprint in a welcome new direction. At Gamescom, I spent an hour or so wayfinding, tackling ever-more-threatening foes and dying, repeatedly. So far, so Souls. But the switch from a European Gothic aesthetic to Sengoku-era Japan is more than a palette swap.
'Sable' is gorgeous, but will live or die on its story
It's been clear that Sable is going to be a very pretty game ever since a few work-in-progress GIFs bounced around Twitter and Tumblr a year or so ago. What hasn't been entirely clear to me is what the game behind those GIFs was going to be. It turns out that it's as ambitious as it is gorgeous.
‘The Butterfly Effect’ explores tech’s impact on the porn industry
Free porn changed the world, and The Butterfly Effect explains how. It's a seven-episode podcast series produced by author and screenwriter Jon Ronson that tracks the wide-ranging impacts of the rise of "tube" sites like Pornhub. The story starts with Fabian Thylmann, who purchased Pornhub's parent company in 2010 and proceeded to buy up a number of key players in the industry before selling it on in 2013. Ronson uses Thylmann as an analog for the rise of free porn -- the proverbial flapping wings of the butterfly -- and then turns his attention to the tornado that decimated the porn industry.
Building the perfect machine in 'Opus Magnum'
I'm not sure how Opus Magnum passed me by when it came to Steam Early Access last year. All I know is that I saw a split-second of it in a YouTube video a few weeks ago and have been obsessed since.
'Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu!' doesn't feel like a remake
Those of us that have enjoyed the series since Red know an uncomfortable truth: Nintendo doesn't have to do much to sell us on a Pokémon game. Millions of us had formative experiences playing the Gen I titles, and since then we've obediently picked up every game that followed. The series has, of course, evolved over time. Hundreds and hundreds of new Pokémon have joined the fray, along with new mechanics and types. But that's all incidental -- I would still enjoy the core loop of exploring, capturing and battling my way to a new Elite Four, regardless of the effort Nintendo puts in.
'Super Smash Bros. Ultimate' is a refinement of a classic formula
It's December 1999. I'm sitting in my best friend's smoke-filled bedroom, frantically mashing the buttons of an N64 controller and having the time of my life. Six months later, I'm in the same smokey hovel, but now I'm deftly dodging attacks, timing blocks and dancing between the platforms of Planet Zebes. And I'm still having the time of my life. This has been the core appeal of the Super Smash Bros. (SSB) series since day one: No matter your skill level or play style, get together with a bunch of friends, and you're going to have a lot of fun. Put in the time to master the game, though, and you'll find a rewarding and deep fighter. Fast-forward the best part of two decades, and at E3 2018, Nintendo has taken the wraps off its latest SSB game, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. A large portion of Nintendo's Direct presentation, and indeed its cavernous E3 booth, was dedicated to the brawler, which is due for release on the Switch December 7th.
NVIDIA kills its 'anticompetitive' GeForce Partner Program
NVIDIA has canceled the GeForce Partner Program (GPP) just two months after announcing it. The GPP began with little fanfare in early March, but it quickly became clear (thanks to work by HardOCP's Kyle Bennett) that it was more than a simple branding initiative. Bennett showed that GPP was encouraging manufacturers to solely produce PCs and laptops with NVIDIA GPUs inside. Manufacturers could still opt for AMD cards, but they would have to be sold through a different brand. Should a manufacturer not play ball, NVIDIA would at best not include it in marketing efforts, and at worst actively hold back inventory to exclude it from upcoming GPU launches.
MIT researchers turn water into 'calm' computer interfaces
Our lives are busy and full of distractions. Modern computing. with its constant notifications and enticing red bubbles next to apps, seems designed to keep us enthralled. MIT Media Lab's Tangible Media Group wants to change that by crafting "calm interfaces." The Tangible Media Group demonstrated a way to precisely transport droplets of liquid across a surface back in January, which it called "programmable droplets." The system is essentially just a printed circuit board, coated with a low-friction material, with a grid of copper wiring on top. By programmatically controlling the electric field of the grid, the team is able to change the shape of polarizable liquid droplets and move them around the surface. The precise control is such that droplets can be both merged and split. Moving on from the underlying technology, the team is now focused on showing how we might leverage the system to create, play and communicate through natural materials.
Even genuine replacement Apple displays can mess with iPhones
Following the news that the latest iOS update can break phones with non-official replacement screens, repairers are encountering a different, more subtle problem: If you put a genuine Apple replacement display into an iPhone 8, 8 Plus or X, it'll no longer be able to adjust its brightness automatically. If Apple or one of its authorized partners were to put the same display in the same phone, though? No problem. The aftermarket repair community has verified the behavior in phones from the US all the way to Australia. It's confirmed to be an issue with phones running iOS 11.1, 11.2 and 11.3, which led sources to suggest it's been a problem since the launch of the latest batch of iPhones last fall. I was able to confirm that even swapping the displays of two brand-new iPhones causes the ambient light sensor to stop working, despite it not being altered or touched in any way. Experiments have shown that the sensor is disabled by iOS during the boot process.
NVIDIA announces exclusive features for GPUs that don't exist
It's been exactly five years since NVIDIA announced Volta, its next-generation GPU architecture. The closest thing to a Volta consumer graphics card we've seen since is the Titan V, a $3,000 offering targeted at scientists that was announced three months ago. Well, today at GDC, NVIDIA is... still not announcing a new GeForce card based on Volta. What it's doing instead is teasing that Volta cards will have some exclusive GameWorks features. The new features are part of "RTX," a "highly scalable" solution that, according to the company, will "usher in a new era" of real-time ray tracing. Keeping with the acronyms, RTX is compatible with DXR, Microsoft's new ray tracing API for DirectX. To be clear, DXR will support older graphics cards; it's only the NVIDIA features that will be locked to "Volta and future generation GPU architectures."
VR escort film pulled from SXSW amid allegations of misconduct
Two days ago, director Michael Jacobs described his first VR short, GFE (an acronym of "girlfriend experience"), to Engadget on camera. The film is a "documentary fantasy," Jacobs said, with a focus on "demystifying escort work and bringing a sense of empowerment to escorts." According to the star of GFE, it does the exact opposite.
Eddy Cue said everything you'd expect about Apple's video strategy
For a session about "Curation in Media," there wasn't a whole lot of talk about Apple News at Eddy Cue's SXSW panel today. Instead, moderator and CNN senior reporter Dylan Byers steered Apple's senior vice president of internet software and services through a wide range of topics, from today's acquisition of magazine platform Texture through Apple Music (it now has 38 million subscribers), free speech, live TV, health care and the company's recent foray into video content.
Witnessing the Church of Elon Musk
SXSW plays host to big-name speakers all the time. Mother! and Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky was on stage yesterday, Apple's Eddy Cue is on a panel tomorrow and Moonlight director Barry Jenkins had a keynote this morning. But something felt different at the Moody Theater in downtown Austin. The crowd was unusually excited, expectant. A thousand or so SXSW attendees, a large number of them press, had congregated, after getting only 12 hours' notice, to hear Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk speak. The panel was scheduled for noon, but at 12:15 PM people were still shuffling in. Either Musk was running late or officials were stalling to let the audience take their seats. A small group in the venue's upper tier began clapping, as though calling for an encore after a concert, and the rhythmic applause swiftly pulsed around the theater, to no avail.
Intel’s quantum computing efforts take a major step forward
It's been almost three months since Intel announced a 17-qubit superconducting chip, meant to pave the way for a future powered by quantum computers. Today at CES, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich showed off its latest superconducting test chip, the 49-qubit Tangle Lake.
Intel will patch all recent chips by the end of January
The potential impact of the major processor security flaw that went public last week can't be understated. But hardware and software companies alike have been quick to patch fixes for the first two reported exploits, Meltdown and Spectre. Intel, which to date is the company most affected by the exploits, already committed to patching "90 percent" of affected processors made in the past five years by the end of this week. Today on stage at CES, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich promised the remaining 10 percent would see fixes by the end of the month.
The makers of 'Resogun' are leaving arcade shooters behind
Over the past decade, the name Housemarque has become synonymous with arcade-style games. From the early PSN title Super Stardust HD to the PS4 launch savior Resogun, the Finnish studio has produced many critically acclaimed and commercially successful games. In recent years, though, good reviews haven't been followed by strong sales. Nex Machina, a colorful top-down arcade shooter released earlier this year, is pure Housemarque. Created in partnership with arcade legend Eugene Jarvis, it's fast-paced, devilishly challenging and with tight controls. It received universal praise from reviewers -- a Metacritic average of 88 makes it the eighth-best-reviewed PS4 game of the year. When I visited Housemarque's Helsinki studio last year, I described the game as "a Hail Mary for arcade shooters" -- and it's now clear that the Hail Mary failed. The company confirmed that it's sold less than 100,000 copies of Nex Machina across both PS4 and PC. The studio has roughly 50 employees working on two games at any given moment, and doing some napkin math will quickly reveal that it lost a lot of money on the game, which it released without the help of a publisher. Matterfall, another arcade-inspired title, arrived in August and similarly failed to set the world on fire. As it was published by Sony, it hasn't affected Housemarque in the same way financially, but it clearly intensified the soul-searching.
'Super Mario Odyssey' is everything it needs to be and more
"A return to form." "A reinvention." There are lots of clichés we fall back on when describing a fresh game in a long-running series. The truth is, Nintendo has constantly reinvented the idea of a 3D Mario game, relentlessly pushing the franchise forward with each release. Super Mario Odyssey is just one more step in the right direction, another evolution of a perfect formula. The setup in Odyssey is as familiar as ever: Bowser has kidnapped Princess Peach, so you need to collect an arbitrary item (Power Moons rather than Stars this time) and chase him down to save the day. This time around, Bowser is going from kingdom to kingdom collecting items -- a ring, a gown and so on -- for a wedding ceremony. It's a coherent enough narrative, but the joy of Mario has never been in its story.
SNES Classic Edition review: Worth it for the games alone
The success of last year's NES Classic Edition clearly took Nintendo by surprise. The company was completely incapable of meeting demand, leaving many people unable to buy what became the must-have gift of the holiday season. Now Nintendo has given its SNES the Classic Edition treatment and promises it's going to build way more than it did last year. Having grown up with the SNES (OK, we had a Sega Genesis and my best friend had SNES), it's easy to assume that everyone knows what it is and why people are so excited that it's back. After dominating the 8-bit era with the NES, Nintendo came late to the party with its sequel. The SNES launched in '90 in Japan, '91 in the US and '92 in the UK. The Genesis had a two-year head start in almost every country, but Nintendo's second-generation home console was worth the wait. The SNES arrived with Super Mario World and F-Zero, among other titles. The former is regarded as one of the greatest games of all time while the latter had faux-3D graphics with fluidity and speed unseen on a console before. For the next five years or so, some special games graced the system: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario Kart, Metroid, Final Fantasy III, Chrono Trigger, Super Mario RPG, Star Fox. I could go on, but essentially, short of Sonic and a few other Sega exclusives, Nintendo destroyed the competition in terms of quality, with dozens of games that have stood the test of time. That puts the SNES Classic in different territory than its predecessor, which, nostalgia aside, featured many games that, for obvious reasons, aren't up to modern standards. While I utterly adore Metroid, trying to introduce someone to the original today is tough. But nearly all the games Nintendo has included in its latest console are as enjoyable today as they were when they were first released.
Three new 'Persona' spin-offs are coming, including 'Q2'
Atlus has just announced a trio of new Persona spin-offs. Following on from the 2015 PS Vita rhythm game Persona 4: Dancing All Night are a pair of new Dancing titles based on Persona 3 and Persona 5. A pair of trailers show Aigis and co. bopping to the Persona 3 soundtrack in Dancing Moon Night, while the Persona 5 team shows of its moves in Dancing Star Night. Both games will come to the PlayStation 4 as well as Vita.