Hello there! It’s me again, Gera – Rock Paper Shotgun’s official ambassador of Canada. I’ll be your guide this week on the balmy seas of gaming’s evening news. As the sun sets on England, I get to work – slipping on my traditional Canadian Press-Touque, before I press my ear tightly against my monitor and listen for incoming news. Alice isn’t convinced by my methods yet, but I prefer it to the alternative: letting our blood into Kieron’s sacred skull then waiting for a press release to form in its drying curdles. I won’t get into how we watch trailers.

In any case: Ubisoft has now launched its latest in Discovery Tours, this time bringing the educational mode to Ancient Greece in Assassin’s Creed Origins.

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In the words of 60s rock group The Byrds, to everything there is a season. A time of love, a time of hate. A time to dance, a time to mourn. For game developers, this past year has been one long summer of Battle Royale season. Which I guess sort of puts the song into a different perspective considering it less a season than one overwhelming and endless new era. Perhaps fad genres are more like seasons in Game of Thrones, which continue on across generations or until the sweet relief of death.

Anyway, Civilization 6 developers Firaxis have launched a new battle royale mode today called Red Death, and it’s free to anyone who already owns the base game.

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Spiders is a development studio you might know for the painfully average The Technomancer, and I m happy to report that 17th Century empire building RPG GreedFall shows they ve experienced some character progression as a team. GreedFall is better. But there are still more problems with this bargain bucket BioWare RPG than there are hats for me to adorn my badass, rogueish, lesbian sorcerer s head with.

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This crazy dystopian timeline of ours might already be heaving with surreal Subway adverts and ironic Burger King memes, yet I’ve always felt like something is missing.

Today I’ve learned that perhaps the missing ingredient all along was…love>? KFC – that glorious hut of chicken that glistens in my dreams like an oily fried mirage – have decided to get into the gaming business with the I Love You, Colonel Sanders!, a dating sim that uses KFC’s advertising budget to turn the Colonel into a svelte hunk who’s looking for love in all the wrong places.

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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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