A Gamer's Week: December 25

It’s much too close for Christmas to review video games and a parched desert largely devoid of new releases lays ahead of us for the first few weeks of 2012, but we have kept up with our Softpedia Game of the Year 2011 series, talking about concept, gameplay and exclusive releases in our articles.

We also have two Weekend Reading pieces for this long weekend, one linked to how hard it is to actually play games in the coming days and another about how I plan to leave gaming behind and stop nagging those around to play.

We also have a EndWeekGame piece to read and a Quick Look at the upcoming King Arthur II – the role-playing Wargame from Neocore Games and Paradox Interactive.

And, as always, we have a selection of the news for the week that passed us by.

On Monday, the well-known museum at the Louvre announced that it would be adopting the Nintendo 3DS handheld as a guide, allowing visitors to locate themselves in 3D as they walk the grounds, while after the Japanese launch players began to complain about a variety of issues with the PlayStation Vita.

On Tuesday, Nintendo and Tecmo Koei announced that they would launch a game called Pokemon x Nobunanga’s Ambition, combining two of the best known series from Japanese developers, while Microsoft launched an Xbox Live promotion for Christmas.

On Wednesday, BioWare talked about the never-ending story of Star Wars: The Old Republic while Warner Bros. and Rocksteady launched another piece of DLC and a cheat code for Batmaa: Arkham City.

On Thursday, Tetris made the news as one developer compared it favorably with Angry Birds while Electronic Arts talked about the profit it aims to derive form the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic.

On Friday, Sony offered more info on the Western launch the PlayStation Vita while Sony opened up the beta application process for PlanetSide 2.