If you need proof that the video game industry’s current rerelease craze has started to lose the plot, look no further than Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered.
Like Sonic Generations of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Sony’s latest gives its debut Horizon game a major visual upgrade that’s far more polished compared to its predecessor. Unlike those games, though, Horizon Zero Dawn isn’t a release from two or three generations ago; it only launched in 2017. Seven years may sound like a lifetime for younger players, but it’s barely any time at all as far as console generations go. If Sony was going to convince players to double-dip, it would need to deliver one heck of a remaster.
I’ll give credit where it’s due: Guerilla Games and Nixxes have risen to that tall task. Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered pumps the PlayStation4 classic up with significantly improved lighting, more detailed faces, brighter colors, and more edits that genuinely do add up. Throw in some DualSense support and you’ve got a definitive edition that anyone coming to the series for the first time should start with. That all may be true, but the reality is that all the improvements in the world still can’t quite make sense of what’s undoubtedly the most needless remaster of this generation.
When Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered was first announced, I rolled my eyes. From a casual perspective, I could barely see a notable difference in its first trailer. After all, 2017 and 2024 aren’t all that far apart in terms of tech. Seven years used to signify an enormous hardware gap, but the differences between two PlayStations continues to shrink with each new machine.
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Now having spent significant time with the console version, I’m willing to eat some of my words. The remaster offers a significant improvement over its predecessor, but one that takes a bit to become apparent. The original game already put its best foot forward in its cinematic opening sequence that shows gorgeous glimpses at its landscapes. When I started a fresh save file and saw it again, I was momentarily stunned. When I pulled up a video of the PS4 opening and watched it side by side, I came back to Earth. Yes, the lighting was improved and infant Aloy looked much cleaner, but the changes didn’t feel too significant.
Sony Interactive Entertainment
My tune quickly changed the deeper I got into its early hours. The first moment that caught my attention was actually a tiny detail. I was in a sequence where a young Aloy finds herself exploring a buried facility full of old computers. I marveled at the more detailed rocks and the streaks of light shining in, but I didn’t snap to attention until I walked into a room full of computers. Their bright purple screens cut through the darkness with a bold glow that drew me toward them. It’s an unassuming tweak over the original game’s flatter lighting, but one that builds more of a contrast between the electronic world and the natural one.
As it turns out, that would become a very functional change. When I’m hunting robots in the wild, their lights are brighter and more pronounced too. It makes it much easier to see my prey from a distance and track them without needing to swap my focus on. While fidelity and performance are always the selling points of projects like this, it’s those thoughtful changes that actually enhance Horizon’s gameplay and world.
There are a lot of obvious changes that one could point to that show off just how much better it all looks. Once I’m in basic conversations with NPCs as opposed to more directed, cinematic scenes, I can see noticeable improvements in faces. It’s obvious in small side characters like Olin, whose bald head gets the shine it deserves, with more detailed skin and smoother edges. When I’m sent into the mountains to complete The Proving ceremony, I see a snowstorm falling around me compared to the original’s much lighter weather conditions. Even little details in the world’s foliage are apparent, as I can see each reed of tall grass precisely bend as my body moves through them.
Sony Interactive Entertainment
You might think that all of this pushes Horizon closer to hyperrealism, but I’d actually argue that it all works to make it more stylized. The original game had a somewhat flat aesthetic that was big on earthy tones. Its sequel, Horizon Forbidden West, would better define the series’ look by peppering in brighter colors that set the world apart from, say, Far Cry. This remaster follows in those footsteps to great effect. Erend’s scarf is a much sunnier shade of yellow. The blue ropes that dangle off of characters similarly pop, with an almost neon hue. Looking back at the PS4 version, and it now looks like raw film that’s yet to be color graded.
In those ways, Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered is a strong visual upgrade that doesn’t just turn the realism knob up and call it a day. It retroactively makes the original more consistent with what the series has evolved into since. That might annoy preservationists who see the color choices and lighting of the original as part of its language, but it’s all tastefully done as far as redos go.
All of this looks great written out or in side-by-side comparison videos, but is any of it an actual good reason to replay a game that still feels brand new? This isn’t a case of Sony porting an inaccessible old game to PS Plus; Horizon Zero Dawn has always been readily available to buy and play on PS5. The same has been true for Until Dawn and both Part 1 and Part 2 of The Last of Us, three games that have gotten similarly needless double-dips during the PS5’s short lifetime. Of those four games, Horizon Zero Dawn’s update feels like the most superfluous.
I genuinely can’t imagine how many people on Earth are so eager to replay a fairly recent game where a visual touch-up that makes foliage look better will get them excited. I get the more aspirational pitch here. For those who have never played Horizon Zero Dawn, this is a great entry point that better connects it to Horizon Forbidden West. Even then, it’s a flawed execution. The Last of UsPart 1 worked as an upgrade because its release was timed alongside HBO’s very popular TV adaptation of it. It was a smart time to bring the PS3 game up to speed, giving it more accessibility features to account for a larger wave of potential players. Horizon’s rerelease isn’t pinned to any such cultural moment. The closest is the upcoming release of Lego Horizon Adventures, but that’s specifically built as an entry point for kids. If they were ready to graduate to the real series after playing it, they could have just done that and skipped the middleman altogether.
Sony Interactive Entertainment
And when is enough enough when it comes to visual upgrades, anyways? Sure, the remaster looks excellent, but it’s still imperfect. Character models tend to unnaturally jerk into place from time to time. When Aloy touches her hair in a cutscene, her hand still goes right through it. I leap to a zipline at one point and Aloy momentarily glides just above it, clinging onto nothing until she’s snapped into place. What is the end goal of an upgrade like this? We don’t need to revisit and revise a game every single time the tech bar moves. Duller colors or less porous faces are not flaws that need to be fixed, just as Casablanca doesn’t need to be colorized.
It’s a bit of a tired cliché when writing about games to say “Who is this for?” Ultimately, every game has an audience, and there’s surely some hive of Horizon superfans out there who will happily take any excuse to replay what’s ultimately an excellent open-world game. But I sincerely find myself asking who projects like this are actually made for. Did we get 2023’s Dead Space remake because it was the right time to revisit a classic or because EA needed to keep a valuable IP relevant? Is there a good reason to replay Until Dawn in 2024, or is Sony Pictures worried that its upcoming film adaptation won’t make a splash if the 2015 game isn’t back in the public eye? Is Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered for me or is it built to be a line item on a fourth-quarter spreadsheet?
These are healthy questions to ask as video game publishers double down on remasters and remakes. It’s easy to get caught up in the kind of hype cycles that can so easily convince us that every game is a gift to players. The cold, hard reality of Sony’s recent remasters is that they are motivated by business more than art. Turning Horizon into a lifestyle brand that players engage with every year is a marketing tactic. That doesn’t mean these games can’t be great. Astro Bot’s collection of PlayStation cameos are built to sell a brand to you, but it doesn’t hurt what’s ultimately a joyful game full of meaningful nostalgia.
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This is a long way of saying that it’s both possible and healthy to hold two thoughts at once: Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered is an unnecessary product that pads out PlayStation’s light holiday lineup, and it’s a gorgeous upgrade that brings new color to a generational classic. If you’ve never played the original, it’s a good excuse to finally jump on that. If you have, nothing about your life will change by upgrading and spending another 60 hours with it. Whether or not your time and money are worth it are up to you, but know that Nixxes and Guerrilla Games have put in the extra effort to make sure there’s a beautiful world waiting for you if you decide to dive in.
Alation on Wednesday launched Alation Anywhere for Google Chrome, an extension of the vendor’s platform that enables customers to discover data and use it to inform decisions without leaving Chrome.
A 2022 study by the Harvard Business Review found that the average employee in a Fortune 500 company toggles between applications and websites 1,200 times per day, which adds up to four hours per week and five weeks out of the year spent context-switching.
Alation Anywhere addresses that wasted time by saving users from having to toggle between applications and the vendor’s environment. Before launching Alation Anywhere for Google Chrome, the vendor previously released extensions of its platform for Slack, Microsoft Teams, Excel and Google Sheets.
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Given that Alation Anywhere for Google Chrome addresses time wasted switching between websites and the Alation environment and speeds access to Alation’s data catalog capabilities, it is a helpful addition to the vendor’s platform, according to Matt Aslett, an analyst at ISG’s Ventana Research.
“The primary goal of capabilities like Alation Anywhere is to accelerate data-driven decision-making,” he said. “It does this by facilitating access to governed and curated data from Alation Data Catalog via business productivity tools and applications. This reduces the need for context-switching, which can delay time to insight.”
Based in Redwood City, Calif., Alation is a data catalog specialist whose Data Intelligence Platform lets users integrate and organize data from disparate sources that can be used to train AI models as well as inform data products such as reports and dashboards.
Toggling between applications is an unpleasant fact.
There’s one application for email, another for instant messaging and collaboration, still another for analyzing data and many more for such tasks as creating presentations, customer relations management and enterprise resource planning.
As the Harvard Business Review’s report noted, more than an entire month of employees’ work year is wasted by switching from one application to another.
Alation has taken steps to reduce some of the lost time by context switching with its initial Alation Anywhere extensions. But more than on Slack and Teams, and more than on Excel and Google Sheets, most applications are now based on the web, according to Stewart Bond, an analyst at IDC.
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Chrome, meanwhile, is the most popular web browser. As a result, Alation Anywhere for Google Chrome addresses a need.
“The browser has become the interface from which most modern applications are accessed,” Bond said. “It takes away the need for people to toggle between the application being used in one tab, and Alation being used in another tab. It should save users time.”
But there’s more to extending Alation’s capabilities to the browser and other applications than just saving time, Bond continued.
By embedding analytics tools in common work applications, vendors, whether data catalog specialists such as Alation and Collibra or any other data management and analytics vendors, make it easier to consume data. When it’s right there, with no toggling necessary, employees are much more likely to use data as a tool than when they’re forced to seek it out.
“Extending Alation Anywhere to Google Chrome is going to deliver intelligence about data to users in their daily flow of work, in context to what they are doing within applications running in the browser,” Bond said. “I suspect [that will] increase effectiveness — having that intelligence available in context will be very useful when building analytical models and reviewing model results.”
“Embedding analytics and data management directly into everyday tools is essential for streamlining workflows and reducing friction,” he said. “With users accessing data from so many different applications and tools, [embedded analytics and data management] simplify access to trusted data and make it easier for users to unlock data-driven insights.”
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Regarding the impetus for adding the Alation Anywhere extensions, including the newest for Google Chrome, Malakar added that customer feedback and the vendor’s own monitoring of industry trends both played roles.
“[They are] a response to our commitment to meeting users within their workflows and in the tools they use most,” he said. “With the modern data stack continuously evolving, especially with AI embedding more deeply in workflows, our goal is to ensure data intelligence is always available where it drives the most value.”
Key features of Alation Anywhere for Google Chrome include the following, according to the vendor:
Streamlined data discovery enabled by Intelligent Search, a semantic-based search engine that employs AI to help users find relevant data for informing decisions and actions.
Metadata preview, a tool aimed at providing users with context about their data by automatically showing users previews of data assets in Snowflake’s Snowsight, a web-based interface, and Microsoft Power BI dashboards alongside Alation’s metadata.
Access within Chrome to standardized organizational terms in the Alation glossary to maintain consistency across reports, presentations and other assets.
Combined, the capabilities included in Alation’s extension for Google Chrome, following the launches of similar extensions for other applications, further Alation’s effort to improve access to data across organizations, according to Aslett.
“The release illustrates the ongoing evolution of the Alation strategy to provide increased access to governed and curated data throughout an enterprise,” he said.
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However, he noted that Alation is not alone among data integration vendors in extending its capabilities the browser. Informatica, Collibra, Qlik, DataGalaxy and Atlan provide browser-based access to their data catalogs, he said.
Going forward
With Alation Anywhere for Google Chrome now available, the vendor’s product development plans over the next year or so will continue to focus on improving its enablement of both technical and non-technical users to discover and curate the trusted data needed to inform decisions, according to Malakar.
That includes enterprise development of AI models and applications.
“As AI and data initiatives become central to enterprises, the demand for real-time, accessible, and reliable data will only increase,” Malakar said. “Alation is committed to evolving our platform to meet these needs … backed by the data they trust.”
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Bond, meanwhile, suggested that Alation needs to find ways to differentiate itself from its competition.
Alation doesn’t just compete with other data integration and data catalog specialists such as Collibra and Informatica. Tech giants AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft also offer data catalogs as part of their larger data management and analytics offerings.
While a browser-based extension is useful for Alation customers, it won’t help the vendor stand out given that numerous other vendors provide similar extensions for their own users. Conversely, the vendor’s recent launch of an AI governance suite not only serves a growing need but is also somewhat unique to date with AI only recently gaining enough widespread use in the enterprise to necessitate governance.
“Alation, not unlike other data intelligence vendors, needs to focus on unique differentiation as an enterprise data intelligence solution as they face competition from data platform vendors and hyperscale cloud vendors also building out data intelligence capabilities,” Bond said.
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Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial and a journalist with more than 25 years of experience. He covers analytics and data management.
While cooking things like chicken, potatoes or veggies, I am often simultaneously waxing poetic about the brief period in my life that I owned an air fryer. It just makes everything easier while still creating really good quality food. Now I’m tempted to get back on the air fryer train thanks to a big sale on Ninja’s DZ550 Air Fryer. The model is currently available in an early Black Friday deal for $130, down from $250 — a 48 percent discount.
The DZ550 is a version of one of our top picks for air fryers — with the extra perk of including a thermometer. The thermometer should provide you with the exact level of cooked you’re looking for across the two independent five-quart air fryer baskets — yes, you can cook two separate things simultaneously. You can also use two different options of the six cooking settings: air fryer, air broil, roast, bake, dehydrate and reheat.
Ninja
The main issue with this air fryer is size. You do not want to get the Ninja DZ550 Air Fryer if your counter and storage spaces are limited. It has a depth of 17.1 inches and a width of 13.9 inches so it’s going to take up some real estate. But, hey, it’s that size that lets you cook two things at once so only you can decide if the trade-off is worth it.
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Electronic Arts reported that its net bookings for the second fiscal quarter ended September 30 were $2.079 billion, up 14% on the strength of American football.
That number exceeded the top end of EA’s own guidance range of $2.05 billion. The company is raising its net bookings guidance range for the fiscal year (ending March 31, 2025) to $7.5 billion to $7.8 billion, up 1% to 5% year over year.
American Football is on track to exceed $1 billion in net bookings for FY25, with total hours played in FYQ2 up over 140% from a year ago. EA also saw new players in the community more than double year over year.
Momentum continues in global football as the franchise saw live service growth across all platforms in FYQ2, and total franchise net bookings in FY25 are on track to grow over a record FY24.
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And EA said The Sims 4 continues to expand, with more than 15 million players joining the game over the past year. Increased engagement led to higher-than-expected net bookings for the franchise in FYQ2.
“EA delivered another strong quarter with record Q2 net bookings, driven by our incredible teams, broad portfolio and technology leadership,” said Andrew Wilson, CEO of EA, in a statement. “The momentum in our business reinforces our strategic vision to deliver innovative experiences and interactive entertainment that deepens and expands engagement across our global communities.”
It’s been a big couple of years for EA in many ways as the company brought back the EA Sports College Football game after a falling out with the NCAA, following up on its launch of EA Sports soccer after leaving behind the FIFA franchise.
“Q2 was another successful quarter for EA, exceeding the high end of our guidance range. As a result, we are also raising our FY25 outlook,” said Stuart Canfield, CFO of EA, in a statement. “We remain confident in our ability to drive long-term value creation through increased scale, driving top-line growth, improved margins, and greater cash flow as shared at our Investor Day.”
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Through September, EA Sports College Football 25 was the best-selling HD title in North America and gives EA three of the top ten HD bestsellers in North America. Global football saw live service growth across all platforms in FYQ2, and total franchise net bookings in FY25 are on track to grow over a record FY24.
Net cash provided by operating activities was $234 million for the quarter and $2.198 billion for the trailing twelve months. EA repurchased 2.6 million shares for $375 million during the quarter under the stock repurchase program, bringing the total for the trailing twelve months to 10.2 million shares for $1.400 billion.
For the fiscal year, net income is expected to be approximately $1.962 billion to $2.123 billion. Diluted earnings per share is expected to be approximately $7.35 to $7.95. Operating cash flow is expected to be approximately $2.075 billion to $2.275 billion.
In the current third fiscal quarter, EA just launched Dragon Age: Veilguard from BioWare after years of development. The company said revenue for the third fiscal quarter ending December 31 is expected to be approximately $1.875 billion to $2.025 billion. Net income is expected to be approximately $2.4 billion to $2.55 billion. Diluted earnings per share is expected to be approximately $3.25 to $3.45.
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Archon Biosciences, a biotech startup putting AI to work designing novel biomolecules, has just emerged from stealth with an impressive $20 million in seed funding. The company aims to supercharge antibody treatments using specially designed protein “cages” that multiply their effects, opening up new opportunities in drug development.
This is the first company to be spun out of Baker Lab, the University of Washington research outfit overseen by pioneering computational biologist and recent Nobel Prize winner David Baker. His team’s work on generative protein design using AI and other means has been foundational in the fast-evolving industry, and Archon is taking a specific aspect of it to market.
One shortcoming of antibody treatments (and research into effective treatments) is that, like all molecular biology, the process depends a bit on chance. It’s difficult to control how much an antibody or protein actually binds to its target on a cell or other surface.
What Archon’s antibody cages, or AbCs, do (as documented in this paper published in Science) is offer a scaffold for modifying and multiplying their effectiveness. A free-floating antibody may have only a small chance of binding to a target protein, but if you were to stick a dozen of them together in a big dodecahedron, that significantly and perhaps profoundly improves that chance.
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This may be the difference between being able to tell if a medication works or not.
“There are many high-profile cases where we understand not only a target’s biology but also why past attempts to drug the target have failed in the clinic. These key disease levers are at our fingertips, but we lack the tools to safely and effectively engage them,” explained James Lazarovits, co-founder and CEO of Archon in a press release. “We have developed a proprietary protein design platform coupled with rapid in-house manufacturing and testing to revolutionize how biologics are developed.”
The startup’s protein design platform uses the generative protein creation and simulation tools created at and licensed from Baker Lab, and the resulting AbCs could have a variety of effects. And they don’t need any exotic manufacturing methods — if you can produce proteins and antibodies at scale, you can probably make AbCs too.
The $20 million round was led by Madrona Ventures with participation from DUMAC Inc., Sahsen Ventures, WRF Capital, Pack Ventures, Alexandria Venture Investments, and Cornucopian Capital; it comes on top of some $7 million in grants from a number of institutes and government agencies.
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Archon is, like UW and Baker Lab, based in Seattle. TechCrunch will be visiting soon to learn and share more about this promising spinout.
Nothing has announced a new version of its Phone 2A Plus featuring a customized glow-in-the-dark design and packaging created in part by some of the company’s “most talented followers.” The Phone 2A Plus Community Edition is the result of a contest held by the company encouraging its community to “build a smartphone of their own imagination.”
The Phone 2A Plus Community Edition is Nothing’s first “major pilot to co-create hardware,” the company says, and resulted in over 900 entries from its community customizing everything from its look to how it will be marketed. The phone will be available to purchase starting on November 12th through Nothing’s website for $399 but is being limited to just 1,000 units.
The Phone (2a) Plus Community Edition’s glowing finish doesn’t draw any power.Image: Nothing
The concept for the Phone 2A Plus Community Edition’s updated design was created by Astrid Vanhuyse and Kenta Akasaki and realized through a collaboration with Nothing’s Adam Bates and Lucy Birley. The phone’s functionality, including three light strips around its rear cameras, hasn’t changed. But the back of the phone is now tinted with a green phosphorescent material that will “emit a soft glow in dark environments” for hours, Nothing says, requiring just daylight to charge.
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The glow-in-the-dark accents are carried forward to the Phone 2A Plus Community Edition’s new packaging, which was reinterpreted by Ian Henry Simmonds with reflective elements and a macro crop of the phone itself.
The Phone (2a) Plus Community Edition will also include a collection of new matching wallpapers.Image: Nothing
Inspired by the original phone’s hardware, Andrés Mateos and Nothing’s software designers used a mix of design tools and AI to create a new set of six matching wallpapers called the “Connected Collection” that will be bundled with the Phone 2A Plus Community Edition. Lastly, Sonya Palma created a new “Find your light. Capture your light” marketing campaign that will be used to promote the Community Edition.
Android 15 and iOS 18 both display images in full HDR
Both operating systems have adopted the ISO 21496-1 standard
Support is still dependent on specific apps
To see all the benefits of HDR (High Dynamic Range) in photos, you need the right software and hardware tech to display the images – and when it comes to software, the latest versions of Android and iOS are now on the same page, so HDR snaps will now look consistent across both mobile platforms.
As explained in detail by Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority, this is due to the adoption of the ISO 21496-1 standard in Android 15 and iOS 18. In simple terms, it just means an agreed upon way of interpreting and displaying HDR information in a picture.
Apple announced at WWDC 2024 back in June that support for ISO 21496-1 was coming to its software platforms, and reports from users suggest that support is now being enabled. On the Android side, ISO 21496-1 is part of the Android 15 roll out – the software is now available for Pixel phones.
Further testing from Android Authority and display analyst Dylan Raga has confirmed that HDR photos are appearing as intended across both Android 15 and iOS 18, whether they were taken on an iPhone or an Android device.
Apps, standards, and displays
The Pixel 9 is one of the first handsets in line for Android 15 (Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)
The key difference HDR makes is extending the range of luminance levels in a picture – practically, that means being able to see details in the darkest and lightest parts of a photo, rather than having them washed out or too dark to see.
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While brightness is the main focus, colors often improve too: HDR images typically look more vibrant and rich than their SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) equivalents. On devices without the necessary HDR support, HDR images are shown in their SDR form.
And to truly see an HDR photo properly on a device – once it’s been correctly captured in HDR form – you need HDR support baked into the device’s operating system, the app you’re using to view the photo, and the device’s display. To make matters even more complicated, there are multiple HDR standards out there.
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Apple and Google have now made the situation slightly less confusing, though app support is still required. Right now, Google Photos (on Android and iOS) and Apple Messages and Apple Photos (on iOS) should all display HDR pictures correctly.
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