ArduinoMania

Goldman Sachs, Apple's banking partner for its credit card and high-yield savings account, is seemingly having doubts about those products. According to The Wall Street Journal, Goldman is looking to get out of the consumer lending business, which could have implications for Apple Card and the associated savings account.

The report suggests that several senior Goldman executives want the company to ditch its remaining consumer lending products — those it offers with Apple as well as the General Motors credit card. No final decision is said to have been made, though the future of Goldman's consumer products may become a little clearer when the finance company reports its quarterly earnings on Tuesday.

Consumer lending efforts such as Apple Card may have been a mistake for Goldman. The business unit that oversees those and GreenSky (a "buy now, pay later" company Goldman bought for around $2.2 billion last year and is selling at a loss) has lost billions of dollars.

Meanwhile, Goldman has run afoul of regulators. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has investigated Goldman's handling of credit card billing errors and refunds. Unlike with other card programs, Apple Card bills go out at the beginning of each month. That's said to put more pressure on Goldman customer service workers who deal with complaints and billing issues. Issuing bills on a rolling basis may alleviate that strain. However, Goldman has reportedly been unsuccessful in convincing Apple to move to a more typical billing cycle.

If Goldman isn't able to reduce expenses for its credit cards, it may try to sell the Apple and GM partnerships, according to the report. That may prove a difficult prospect, given that customers have deposited billions of dollars into Apple savings accounts. If Goldman manages to get another bank to take over the Apple partnership (including those hefty savings accounts), the Journal noted that the finance company may have to raise expensive emergency funding to cover any shortfall.

Goldman is said to have had talks with American Express about taking over its consumer products. However, Amex reportedly has concerns regarding the Apple Card’s loss rates and other factors Goldman has been attempting to remedy. Amex leaders are also said to have bristled at the fact the Apple Card operates on the Mastercard network.

Australia has fined X (formerly Twitter) for failing to answer all its questions about child exploitation. The country’s government levied a penalty of AUD 610,500 (around $387,000) for the Elon Musk-owned company’s non-compliance with a national law requiring social platforms to disclose how they’re combating online child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

“Companies can make empty statements like ‘Child exploitation is our top priority,’ so what we’re saying is show us,” Julie Inman Grant, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, told The New York Times in an interview. “This is important not only in terms of deterrence in the types of defiance we are seeing from the companies but because this information is in the public interest.”

Australian officials said neither X nor Google fully complied with the questions. While Google received a formal warning for “giving generic or aggregated information across multiple services where information regarding specific services was required,” X’s violation “was more serious.” Inman Grant said X failed to reply adequately to questions while leaving other boxes blank. “In other instances, Twitter provided a response that was otherwise incomplete or inaccurate,” she wrote.

Jerod Harris via Getty Images

The official says her department sent a notice to X (then Twitter) on February 22, asking it to fulfill its report by answering mandatory questions; she gave the company 35 days to reply. The company responded on March 29. Inman Grant wrote that she identified 14 questions (including sub-questions) where the firm failed to provide the required info. Her office sent follow-up questions on April 6. Musk’s company responded on May 5, leading Inman Grant to conclude the company had held back info in its initial response. She wrote, “It is evident from many of X Corp.’s subsequent responses that it held information required by the Notice and was capable of providing that information at first instance.”

Inman Grant wrote that the nation can seek civil penalties through the courts if X doesn’t pay the fine. And more compliance tools are on the way. “We also have more powerful systemic tools coming online next year in the form of industry codes and standards which will ensure companies are living up to their responsibilities to protect children,” she wrote.

As highlighted by The NYT, X told the Australian regulators, “Children are not our target customer, and our service is not overwhelmingly used by children.” However, CEO Linda Yaccarino recently said in a forum that Gen Z was the platform’s fastest-growing demographic, with 200 million unique monthly visitors among teens and young adults in their 20s.

The once-ubiquitous social media site Myspace is getting the documentary treatment, with a film currently in the works that chronicles the rise and fall of the house that Tom built. The movie’s a joint project between production companies Gunpowder & Sky and The Documentary Group, as originally reported by Deadline.

Gunpowder & Sky has produced a number of well-known documentaries, such as 69: The Saga of Danny Hernandez and Everybody’s Everything, about deceased rapper Lil Peep. The Documentary Group’s behind shows like Amend: The Fight for America and The Deep End, a series focusing on spiritual wellness guru Teal Swan.

As for behind-the-camera talent, the film’s being directed by Tommy Avallone, who recently helmed the Barney docuseries I Love You, You Hate Me and The Bill Murray Stories: Life Lessons from a Mythical Man. The film will feature the social media site’s founders Tom Anderson (yes, that Tom) and Chris DeWolfe, in addition to a spate of celebrities who got their start on the platform.

Myspace was the social media site to beat before it was, well, beat by Facebook. The platform launched in 2003 and set the world on fire, becoming an important music promotional tool long before Bandcamp, Spotify and even YouTube. There was a guy named Tom who everyone was chums with. Folks agonized over which real-life friends to put in their list of top eight digital friends. There were some truly grody wallpaper options for your page, and the idea of an Internet troll wasn’t really a thing yet. It was a simpler time.

Gunpowder & Sky CEO Van Toffler said the documentary is a no-brainer for folks of a certain age bracket, noting that his colleagues at the time “were all obsessed with Myspace,” going on to say “without Myspace there’s no TikTok, no Facebook, no YouTube, no Instagram, no social media.”

One must understand that before Facebook, people just expected social media sites to enjoy a few months or even years in the sun before making way for the next big thing. That’s the way it was with Myspace, Friendster, SixDegrees, Classmates and all the rest. Then along came Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, beginning the era of the “too big to fail” social media platform. Recent years have finally shown cracks in the armor of these old-school giants, with Twitter’s stark drop from relevance and generational shifts from Facebook to platforms like TikTok. In other words, massive sea changes of the kind that sank Myspace are no longer unthinkable.

There’s no release date for the Myspace documentary, nor has there been an announcement if it would run in theaters or just on a streaming platform. We'll have to play the waiting game for a while longer.  

What could be better than a Halloween decoration? Something more perennial, or even something that could also be found in a classroom or lab. Something like [Markus Bindhammer]’s spooky muscle-brain interface. It was inspired by a series called “Tales From the Loop” in which a character’s muscle electrical activity is measured in preparation to adjust his prosthetic hand.

Essentially, it does what you think it does: attach the sensors to your muscles, move them around, and watch the brain light up. [Markus] started with a children’s learning kit that involves molding the brain and discs out of red rubbery goop, the vertebrae out of plaster, and then assembling the whole thing.

Instead, [Markus] molded the brain and vertebrae in two-part silicone for durability, and used two-component colored epoxy for the discs.

As the inspiring series is set in the 80s (we assume the brown, dingy 80s and not the fun, neon 80s), [Markus] gave the enclosure/stand an appropriate color scheme. Inside that box there’s an Arduino Pro Micro, a Grove EMG detector, and a mini step-up converter module. And of course, under the brain, there’s a NeoPixel ring. Don’t miss the build and demo video after the break.

There are a ton of things you can do with blinkenlights for Halloween. How about a light-up candy slide, or a bucket that seems them coming?

Twitch announced today that stories are now available in the platform’s mobile app. Similar to the feature of the same name on Snapchat, Instagram and other social platforms, Twitch’s stories let streamers post photos, text or clips that expire after 48 hours. The company frames the feature as helping creators reach and stay connected with their communities while offline. It first announced the feature in July.

At least at launch, the ability to create Twitch stories is limited to partners and affiliates with at least one stream from the last 30 days. However, all users (after updating to the app’s latest version) will be able to see them at the top of the Following page. The company says access will roll out gradually to eligible streamers by the end of this week — and beyond as more creators meet the requirements.

In addition, creators with at least 30 subscribers (including gift subs) can make subscriber-only stories. Twitch recommends using this feature to “add even more value to your supporters’ subscriptions through exclusive content.”

Twitch suggests using stories for easy outreach to followers, scheduling updates and adding visual flare or fun. The mobile app will push alerts to followers when a streamer posts a story, although it also includes notification settings to control the frequency. Meanwhile, creators can see the total views and reactions for each story they post — including after they expire.

“Viewers will see your stories live alongside stories created by other streamers they follow, so post regularly throughout the week to keep your community in-the-know and up-to-date between your streams,” the company wrote in its announcement blog post.

LinkedIn has announced its second round of layoffs this year. The Microsoft division is shedding around 668 workers from across its engineering, product, talent and finance teams.

"While we are adapting our organizational structures and streamlining our decision making, we are continuing to invest in strategic priorities for our future and to ensure we continue to deliver value for our members and customers," LinkedIn said in its announcement. "We are committed to providing our full support to all impacted employees during this transition and ensuring that they are treated with care and respect."

In May, LinkedIn revealed plans to lay off 716 people and close its job search app in China. As such, LinkedIn will have cut nearly 1,400 jobs this year amid widespread layoffs across the tech industry in 2023. Microsoft, which just bought Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion, laid off around 10,000 workers in the first few months of 2023.

In Microsoft's most recent earnings report (which covers April to June), the company said that LinkedIn's earnings had increased by five percent year-over-year. It noted that membership growth had "accelerated for eight quarters in a row" and that the platform had more than 950 million users. Microsoft is set to announce financial results for the July-September period, the first quarter of its fiscal year, on October 24.

Google had a fairly generous offer for those who pre-ordered a Pixel 8 device: the company tossed in a Pixel Watch 2 or Pixel Buds Pro for free. While the new handsets are now on the market and that offer is no longer available, you haven’t necessarily missed out.

A bundle of the Pixel 8 Pro and Pixel Watch 2 has dropped from $1,349 to $999 at Amazon. Given that the Pixel Watch 2 costs $349, you’ll effectively be getting the wearable for free.

Along with the Tensor G3 chip and new displays, the Pixel 8 lineup offers genuinely useful AI features. Intuitive photo editing, the ability to generate a custom wallpaper and being able to remove distracting ambient noises using Audio Magic Eraser are all major plus points. We gave the Pixel 8 Pro a score of 93 in our review thanks to these factors along with others such as a major improvement to battery life, the addition of a temperature sensor and a very welcome extension of software support to seven years.

As for the Pixel Watch 2, we feel that it's a worthy improvement over the original model that's helping Google catch up to rival smartwatches. We gave it a score of 79 in our review, highlighting aspects such as far better battery life (which was the major drawback of the original Pixel Watch), a great heart-rate sensor and the slick design. We took issue with some of the software quirks though, along with the lack of wireless charging and the fact you need to connect to Wi-Fi to sync the device.

That’s not the only bundle Amazon has on sale. You can effectively get a set of Pixel Buds Pro for free when you buy a Pixel 8 bundle, which is currently $200 off at $699.

We gave the Pixel 8 a score of 90. Storage tops out at 256GB (you can deck out the Pixel 8 Pro with up to 1TB of storage, by comparison), the lack of mmWave 5G support and no pro camera controls were our major negatives. That said, while it doesn't have quite as many bells and whistles as the Pixel 8 Pro, it's still a great smartphone.

Meanwhile, we feel that the Pixel Buds Pro are Google's best earbuds to date. In our review last year, we gave them a score of 87. They deliver solid bass and good active noise cancellation performance, but at the time of our review we felt that the call quality and transparency mode were lacking.

Google has been improving the earbuds over time with software updates. It recently upgraded them with call quality enhancements and a feature that pauses music and activates transparency mode when the Pixel Buds Pro detect that you're speaking.

These bundles should help to offset the $100 Google tacked onto the price of each phone compared with the Pixel 7 lineup. You can check out the full Pixel 8 sale at Amazon, but you'll need to act quickly if you're interested in either of bundle we've highlighted here. The deals are only available until 11:59PM PT on October 16 or while stocks last.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

With shipments of its Pocket handheld console finally under control, Analogue is turning its attention to a whole new retro machine. The Analogue 3D aims to be the ultimate Nintendo 64, playing original cartridges on modern 4K displays. I’d love to show it to you, but Analogue is only releasing a teaser image and a few key specs today.

The Analogue 3D is the latest in a line of consoles from the company that emulate retro hardware. All of Analogue’s machines use field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) that are coded to mimic original hardware. Rather than playing ROM files like most software emulators, Analogue consoles play original media — in this case N64 carts — without the downsides that software emulation often brings, such as increased input lag or visual imperfections.

Analogue

Analogue started out with boutique recreations of Neo Geo and NES hardware, before targeting a more casual audience with systems that mimicked the SNES and Genesis. Its most splashy release to date is the Pocket, which emulates a variety of handhelds. There’s also the TurboGrafx-like Analogue Duo, which was announced in 2020 and, after some delays, will apparently ship this year.

That may seem like a disparate group of consoles, but there is one thing that ties them together: they’re all pretty primitive. If you’ve been around a while, you’ll remember consoles being referred to as 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit and so on. A lot of that was marketing, but the hardware of 8-bit systems is broadly less complex to recreate than that of 16-bit systems, and so on. As the first true “64-bit” console on the market, the N64 is by far the most complex system Analogue has tackled to date. Its 64-bit 93.75MHz CPU was wild for a $200 console — even if most developers still wrote 32-bit code for it — and its Silicon Graphics “reality coprocessor” was the stuff of (extremely nerdy) playground legend. They made the T-rex from Jurassic Park with (better versions of) that thing!

Analogue

The Analogue 3D is described as a “reimagining” of Nintendo’s console, and the company is promising 100 percent compatibility with carts from all regions. It will output at 4K resolution with Original Display Modes that target “reference quality recreations” of specific CRTs and PVMs. To translate, that means Analogue is building filters that might, for example, make a modern OLED or LCD display feel more like a dope mid-'90s Sony Trinitron TV. No word on whether they’re baking in a recreation of the weird LG TV with legs I played on for most of the ’00s.

Internals aside, the N64 has a small library of games and a mistake of a controller, but there are some classics in there. On the first-party side, The Legand of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask have both held up to decades of scrutiny, and Mario 64, some camera issues aside, is as fun to play in 2023 as it was in 1996. Then there’s Paper Mario, Mario Kart 64, F-Zero X, Star Fox 64, Super Smash Bros. and countless others. Rare also did some fantastic work on the N64 with the likes of GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark, Banjo-Kazooie, Diddy Kong Racing and Conker's Bad Fur Day. 

Quality third-party titles were harder to come by, but Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, Mischief Makers, Harvest Moon 64 and the Turok games are all worth checking out. (I personally spent more time playing Horse in an average port of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater than any of these, but there’s no accounting for taste.)

Analogue / 8BitDo

One thing very few people remember fondly is the N64’s three-paddled controller, which at the time felt fine but boy was it not. The Analogue 3D will have four controller ports, just like the original N64, but it thankfully also supports Bluetooth and 2.4G wireless connectivity. 8BitDo will be releasing a companion controller for the console, which is all-but invisible in the picture above. After some toying around in Photoshop, it appears to be very similar to the company’s Ultimate controller, but with C-buttons where the regular face buttons would be, the A+B buttons replacing the right analog stick and a big ol' start button in the middle.

There’s no word yet on price — early Analogue machines cost a lot, but its more recent efforts have been more palatable. The Analogue Duo, which has a CD drive inside, cost $250 when pre-orders went live, so it seems a fair guess to say it’d be in the same price range — though you’ll need to budget for a couple of controllers no matter the price, as Analogue doesn't supply them with any of its systems.

The Analogue 3D is currently slated to ship in 2024, and knowing Analogue, pre-orders will open some time in the next few months and sell out almost immediately.

For my money, web-swinging around New York City in Marvel’s Spider-Man is perhaps the singular best game mechanic I’ve come across in the last decade or so. It feels so incredibly right, and almost everything else in that game is built off it. I never really wanted to use fast-travel features, because swinging around was much more fun, and finding hidden missions and helping citizens in trouble as you traverse NYC is almost as rewarding as following the game’s main story. Of course, a great mechanic isn’t enough to make a great game, but Spider-Man is one of the most successful open-world style games I can think of, because it felt packed without being overwhelming.

My first impressions of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 was that developer Insomniac Games turned everything up to 11, packing in more. The map is about twice as big as the original, adding in a chunk of the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens to go along with Manhattan, and the web wings offer a new way of traversing the huge map. There are more playable characters, as you spend nearly equal time jumping between OG Spider-Man Peter Parker and his protégé Miles Morales. Peter and Miles have more special moves than ever before to turn the tides in combat, and there are more skills for them to learn. Conversely, enemies have a lot more ways to mess you up, if you’re not careful.

As such, my main concern for Spider-Man 2 was that Insomniac tried to pack in too much — take what happened to the Assassin’s Creed series with AC: Valhalla as a cautionary tale. However, now that I’ve finished the game, and completed about 75 percent of all the activities and quests available, I can confidently say that Insomniac has built a tight, compelling game with a storyline that ends up with serious momentum, making it all but impossible to put down through the second half. It’s just as satisfying as ever to play as the two Spider-Men, whether you’re flying around NYC or taking on hordes of bad guys. And while the story sucked me in, there are hosts of other things for a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man to do for the city’s citizens, including substantial side quests and smaller activities that enhance the story and your capabilities.

Sony / Insomniac Games

Just like the first game, Spider-Man 2 wastes no time hitting you with a bombastic action sequence that kicks off the game’s main plot. This time, Pete and Miles take on classic villain Sandman, who escapes transport to the city’s prison for super-villains and rampages throughout the streets, getting larger and more difficult to manage. As with the intro of most games, this is meant to teach you the capabilities of the two playable characters, and it does so without feeling too heavy-handed or disconnected from the main meat of the game.

It’s not long before we learn of a new threat to the city: Kraven and his band of hunters are tracking down super-villains for sport and causing plenty of distress while they do so. Perhaps most significantly, they’re trying to return Dr. Curt Connors to his menacing alter-ego, The Lizard, a move that has serious implications for Peter, Miles, Pete’s girlfriend MJ Parker and their friend Harry Osborne. Harry was mentioned but not seen in the first game, as he was ill and in recovery through some very experimental treatment that has returned him to his friends in this episode.

Sony / Insomniac Games

In the first third of the game, the traditional action sequences are augmented by a few flashbacks as well as sections of the game that are more about atmosphere and character-building – like one where teenaged Pete and Harry sneak through their high school, or a sequence where Pete, MJ and Harry enjoy a night at a lovingly-rendered version of the Coney Island boardwalk before things inevitably go awry. Those sequences were a little hit or miss, as they did steal away a bit of momentum – but they also provided a break from the pattern of “travel across the city, investigate, beat up bad guys.”

I won’t spoil how it happens, but the unofficial first act ends with Peter coming into possession of the fabled black symbiote suit, which greatly enhances his powers in combat in a way that’s both fun and also a little distressing. If you know anything about Spider-Man lore, you probably know where the story is going. But without going too deep, I can say that Insomniac created a familiar take on the tale of Spider-Man and Venom that nonetheless has a number of unexpected twists. Like I said earlier, I was positively glued to the game, particularly in the second half. The combination of the compelling story and outstanding gameplay elements simply made it hard to stop playing.

Let’s get into that gameplay. Sony and Insomniac have made a big deal about the fact that you can quickly swap between Peter and Miles to have different Spidey-experiences, and it’s as simple as holding a button down when you’re in the open-world part of the game. But the structure of the story dictates that you’re usually either Peter or Miles as the “lead” character for the main quests. The same goes for some of the side quests and activities you’ll find around NYC; there are plenty that you can achieve as either Pete or Miles, but some require you to switch to a specific character.

Sony / Insomniac Games

There are a number of major set-pieces throughout the game, including the Sandman intro, that blend action between the two Spider-Men. You’ll shift seamlessly between the two characters depending on what the action calls for, but you can’t just switch on the fly. It’s all pretty scripted, which makes sense but is still a little bit of a bummer. And while Miles and his crew of friends that were introduced in 2020’s mini-sequel Spider-Man: Miles Morales get plenty of screen time, the story and action lean slightly more towards Peter. If I had to guess, I’d say you control him for 60 percent of the main story. Miles fans shouldn’t be too disappointed, though, because you get to control him through a few of the game’s most intense and thrilling moments.

Insomniac did a great job of both streamlining and expanding combat. Peter and Miles each have four special attacks you can slot that regenerate through combat, giving you some options for discovering and picking your favorite moves. A lot of the gadgets from the first game return, but they’re easier than ever to access. Previously, if you wanted to use a gadget you’d have to hold R1 and switch from your web-shooters to another option. Now, web-shooters are always triggered by mashing R1, but you can hold R1 and hit one of the four face buttons to activate your slotted gadgets. It’s a great quality of life improvement that makes it a lot easier to deploy everything in your arsenal when you’re in a big battle.

The special attacks are likewise triggered by holding L1 and pressing a face button, and these are the main ways to differentiate between Peter and Miles. Otherwise, their combat skills and abilities are pretty similar, and there are lots of upgrades you can make to increase your health bar or the amount of damage you deal that apply to both characters. There’s a shared Peter and Miles skill tree as well as individual ones for each character that focus on their particular special moves. I was worried managing all this was going to get old and overly complicated, but I never felt overburdened by the variety of choices I could make, thanks partially to the fact that the game is generous about dolling out skill points to redeem.

Sony / Insomniac Games

Some of those skill upgrades relate to traversal — how far you travel when swinging from a web line or how fast you boost off an object. There’s a new skill you can use to web-slingshot yourself into motion, which is great to use when you’re on the ground and want to get moving quickly. But the web wings are the biggest change to how you get around NYC, and they’re a delight to use. Tapping X deploys the wings, and you can search for wind tunnels and updrafts to keep you moving quickly and well above street level.

Web-swinging is still my favorite move, but the wings come in extremely handy for some specific missions, including the wild on-the-river chase that Sony showed off a few months ago. Using the wings almost makes piloting the Spider-Men feel like you’re driving a race car, as you can turn corners a lot quicker and with more precision than I anticipated. It’s a totally different experience than web-swinging, and eventually I found myself switching between both techniques to build up speed or tackle certain geographical challenges as I explored the map.

Probably my biggest complaint with the gameplay is something I remember noticing in the first game: There are more than a few moments where the big climax of an action sequence takes place only in a cutscene, where the player has no control or input into what’s on the screen. I get that there are some sequences that are so far outside of the move set players have that they need to be cutscenes, but the game is otherwise so good at immersing you in large-scale conflicts that it’s jarring to be completely pulled out of the action.

Unlike the previous two games, Spider-Man 2 is exclusive to the PS5;the original was built for the PS4 while Miles Morales had a simultaneous release on both consoles. Insomniac didn’t waste any of the horsepower it had to play with here: the game looks incredible. As with many AAA games, you can pick a “fidelity” mode that runs at 30 fps with full 4K graphics and effects like ray tracing, or scale things down a bit for a higher frame rate (up to 120 fps, if your TV supports it) in “performance” mode. As usual, I went for high frame rates, but spent time in both. Rest assured that, whatever your preference, this game is a graphical stunner, with intricately detailed character models — massive bad guys like the Lizard are particularly stunning.

Sony / Insomniac Games

The city, meanwhile, looks gorgeous whether it’s at sunset or in the train, whether the streets are filled with tourists and pedestrians or deserted from the latest calamity. Local landmarks like Radio City Music Hall, Madison Square Garden and Avengers Tower are rendered lovingly, and the new boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn have their own distinct identities in the game just as they do in real life. I’m looking forward to spending more time just exploring the cities and taking in all the detail Insomniac included, probably while using the expansive Photo Mode for some virtual photography.

Insomniac also took advantage of the DualSense controller’s features like adaptive triggers and impressive haptic feedback. There’s a pleasing amount of tension when using the triggers to swing around the city, as well as a number of times when you’ll need to perfectly balance the amount of pressure you’re putting on the triggers to execute a move. As with most games, the DualSense features don’t radically change the experience, but they enhance it in ways that you might not immediately realize but would notice if they went away.

Sony / Insomniac Games

In the last few years, I’ve had an increasingly hard time coming up with original ways to describe Sony’s first-party games. In the PS4 generation, games like Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War and Spider-Man all combined excellent storytelling with huge worlds and outstanding gameplay. As such, the recent sequels have all felt like they had to up the stakes and make longer, more complicated games. While I love God of War Ragnarok and Horizon Forbidden West, I also occasionally felt they were just trying to do too much.

That’s not the case with Spider-Man 2. It’s a perfectly balanced game with gorgeous graphics, delightful combat and traversal systems, a compelling storyline and characters, plenty of challenge and a huge map to explore. Perhaps most importantly, though, it’s just fun. In a year where I’ve struggled to connect with games that I expected I’d love, it was a relief to play Spider-Man 2 and immediately get sucked into the world. Whether or not you’ve played Insomniac’s earlier Spider-Man games, anyone should be able to jump into Spider-Man 2 and immediately feel like a superhero.

As gaming laptops and dedicated portable consoles like the Steam Deck eat up all of the press, it’s easy to forget the humble tower desktop. Alienware sure hasn’t, as it just announced the latest refresh to its popular Aurora line of mid-tower gaming desktops. The Aurora R16 is a legit monster that the company says can overclock to an incredible 6.1GHz to handle even the most advanced modern gaming applications.

As a matter of fact, Alienware says this is the company’s first system to reach beyond 6Ghz. This is due to the inclusion of an Intel Core 14th Gen processor, a two UDIMM memory architecture and a custom motherboard based on the Intel Z690 chipset. You can overclock via a BIOS switch to fly past that 6GHz benchmark.

Gaming PCs are also largely defined by the GPU, and the R16 ships with the scarily-powerful Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card with 24GB of GDDR6X memory, though that’s the top-of-the-line model. You have plenty of GPU options here, all the way down to the GeForce RTX 3050 with 8GB of GDDR6 memory. You can also choose up to 64GB of DDR5 XMP memory and up to 4TB of SSD storage.

Aurora desktops have been a mainstay with PC gamers since 2009, but this latest release represents a near-total redesign. The R16’s inspired by the industrial form factor of the company’s Legend 3 gaming laptop. You get a nifty cube design that’s 40 percent smaller than last year’s R15, while still emphasizing accessibility and user upgrades. The chassis ships with either a solid door or a clear side panel so you can marvel at all of those sweet techy innards. The new cube shape also makes it easier to find the perfect spot on or under your desk.

Alienware

With all of that new power comes new thermal regulation requirements. The R16 boasts larger air-intakes and exhausts than the R15, with hexagonal side vents and a new vertical stadium to provide a larger surface area for airflow. The top face also features a larger surface area for the purposes of exhaust. All told, the company says these upgrades contribute to a seven percent reduction in overall temperature when compared to the R15, despite the added power. You also have your choice of air-cooled or liquid-cooled CPUs.

The R16 also integrates with the company’s Alienware Command Center 6.0 software suite, a first for desktops. This software lets you adjust nearly every aspect of the PC, from the AlienFX lighting, thermal regulation, game presets and much more. As for user upgrades, you have two DIMM slots for memory, 2x M.2 PCIe slots for SSD storage and an additional 3.5” HDD slot. All configurations also support Wi-Fi 6E and 2.5 Gbps ethernet.

The Alienware Aurora R16 will be available for purchase tomorrow and starts at $2,200. This is for a bare-bones model, however, so you could potentially pay hundreds more for access to each and every bell and whistle.