The promise of immersive, sharp and dense worlds to explore feels real when roaming the streets of Yokohama in "Yakuza: Like a Dragon." The characters and city explode in color and detail in ways I had never seen in past "Yakuza" titles and locations. The series struggled to hit both high-resolution, high framerate gameplay in the last console generation. That is now achievable on both Series X and S; both versions feature "performance" and "fidelity" modes, offering 60-frames gameplay under the "performance" option. There's parity in the "Yakuza" experiences not found in "Valhalla," and that's some comfort when comparing the X and S.

Pindrop, an Atlanta-based voice security and authentication firm, has released Pindrop Protect 4.0, which includes its patented high-definition Phoneprinting technology that analyzes more than 1,300 features of a call's audio to detect the subtle anomalies that indicate fraud, and determine the device type, geolocation and carrier. Phoneprinting 2.0, coupled with accuracy enhancements in metadata analysis, delivers 10 times the clarity compared with its predecessor, Pindrop says. These upgrades enable Pindrop Protect to increase the detection rate of the "most sophisticated fraudsters by 20 percent." Call centers in the U.S. receive a fraudulent call every second, according to Pindrop Labs' research. Fraud losses totaled $14 billion last year, and companies are spending an additional $8 billion annually on authenticating customers, the company says.