Time to ready your chainsaws, folks, because Gears 5 is finally out on PC. As you may remember from my Gears 5 Tech Test performance piece a couple of months ago, developers The Coalition seem to have done an excellent job keeping their latest cover shooter all slick and spangly this time round, as even ageing graphics cards such as Nvidia’s GTX 970 and AMD’s R9 290 are more than capable of running the game at 60fps on High at 1080p. But what if your graphics card is so old it doesn’t even meet the game’s minimum> PC requirements? What then? Is there any hope for getting smooth, waist-high shooty fun times, or should you just throw your GPU in the bin and resign yourself to that long-awaited upgrade?

Well, I thought I’d put my five-year-old 2GB AMD Radeon R9 270 graphics card to the test to find out. It might not be able to run Control and Metro Exodus on Low at 1920×1080, but with a bit of tinkering in Gears 5’s excellent graphics options menu, it’s surprising what you can achieve – so much so that I was even able to keep things like character and world texture details on High and still a playable frame rate. Here’s how:

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In a thousand years, when all the oceans have boiled away, when the continents have re-merged to form a single Pangea, this is how I imagine World Of Warcraft will look.

YouTube user Daniel L. has released a mighty fly-over video of the streets of Alliance metropolis Stormwind, fully remade in Unreal Engine 4. It’s just over five minutes long, opening over the Valley of Heroes before hitting all the Stormwind hot spots – Weller’s Arsenal in the Trade District, the Magic Quarters which overlook the city below, a passage in Old Town leading down toward The Five Deady Venoms. The result looks like a World Of Warcraft of the year 3000, where Blizzard have patched out its cartoon aesthetic and replaced it with its closest Unreal approximation of medieval Edinburgh.

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I am repeatedly amazed by my ability to be bullied in almost any social situation, no matter how narrow the means of communication. I m fairly certain I could be dissed by semaphore, or slagged off over morse code. In four-player co-operative track building game Unrailed you can only express yourself using four emojis and a few resource icons, but even that is enough verbal bandwidth for my online teammates to be mean to me, hounding my tiny dinosaur avatar with a barrage of floating angry faces as I inadvertently choose the worst available train upgrade in the menu screen between levels. In the growing list of places I ve been harangued by the general public, this game joins a Pizza Express in Nottingham town centre, a baptism I was pretty certain I had been invited to, and several garden centres (if you re not supposed to climb into the pond to touch all of the fish, there should be a sign).

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Gears 5 features a full campaign that will take hours to play from beginning to end normally, but is filled to the brim with components to upgrade your hover bot – Jack. These aren’t the only collectibles as there are tons of hidden trinkets which are not immediately obvious to find. We’ve scoured through the entirety of the first act to find all of the Gears 5 collectibles so that you don’t have to do the detective work.

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Spooky-ooky coming-of-age story Life Is Strange 2 has run into trouble with the Australian Classification Board and will be removed from sale down under for about a fortnight while they sort this out. If you already have it on PC (called a ‘compo’ or ‘pozza’ in Australia, probably), you’re grand. The developers don’t say exactly what the dispute is about, but I’d wager it’s down to something which has happened in later episodes of the series. Possibly a drug. Oh no.

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It’s been six weeks since I started my space empire. I’ve gone from the one-thousand-and-somethingth strongest player to an agonising 102nd. My territory spans nine space stations and two sectors, my ships number in the tens of thousands, and I have put enough of my spare (spare!) resources into an alliance project to start building a Dyson sphere.

Yet somehow, I don’t really know what I’m doing.

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Telltale’s complete run of Walking Dead story-o-adventures is now available bundled up The Walking Dead: The Telltale Definitive Series, with a few bonus bits and pieces too. That’s 23 episodes across four seasons, a miniseries, and one interstitial, stuffed into one digital bag with a load concept art, a music player, and the option to play the whole series with the comic book-y “graphic black” art style introduced late in the run. With no upgrade discount for owning any of the originals, The Definitive Series is probably more for newcomers and completionists – but maybe you’re one of those?

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The Gears Of War gang are back once again to scurry around behind waist-high cover and take pot-shots at… wait hang on, is that some kind of desert surfsled up there? Tell me more, Gears (Of War) 5. Following an early launch of its fancy Ultimate Edition last week, Microsoft’s latest grand spectacle launched properly overnight. I haven’t played Gears since 2, the one where you run around inside a miles-long worm chainsawing its hearts, though what I’ve heard about this one’s story campaign does have my interest.

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Oh no. It’s happening again. Slay The Spire has released a new character on the beta branch, and I’m once more betwixt its jaws. She’s still being tested and won’t appear in the main game for a while, but let me introduce you to the Watcher. She’s a monk who flows between “stances”. Calm, one moment, a hurricane of double damage the next – albeit a hurricane that takes double damage themselves. They’re the most elegant and simultaneously fiddly character to date. I was up till 2am. I should know.

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Hello biffers, your Mars is in ascendance. That astrologist you consulted about your mortgage now has a relatable character to use in punchsome fighting game Tekken 7. Zafina is a purple clad fighter with a keen interest in the stars circling your head after she knocks you the flip out. She also has a giant claw for a hand, because what self-respecting Gemini doesn’t have an evil limb that threatens to take control of their mind? Alongside her release today comes a free update with new moves for other players and some other small changes to the knuckle sandwich ’em up. Come and fight me for them.

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