A Gamer’s Week: February 5

This week we have a Softpedia review of Shinobi and our series of articles about the video games that will arrive during this year continues under the Incoming 2012 tag.

When it comes to Quick Looks, we have three of them out this week: one which deals with the multiplayer-oriented demo for Syndicate, the reboot from Starbreeze and Electronic Arts, another for King Arthur II – The Role-playing Wargame, the strategy from Neocore Games and Paradox Interactive, and the last one for AVSEQ, a charming indie rhythm and match game.

We also have two Weekend Reading pieces, one of them about how strategy game developers should band together to launch their titles during just one month of the year in order to raise the profile of the genre, and another focusing on the rise of the multiplayer demo and its detrimental effects on gaming.

As always we also deliver a EndWeekGame piece about what we are currently enjoying in our spare time.

And we also have a selection of the most interesting news from the week that was.

On Monday, the developers still working on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 promised that a new update would solve any problems that Xbox 360 gamers have with their downloadable content while a rumor says that the 2012 Assassin’s Creed title will be set during the American Revolutionary war.

On Tuesday, BioWare talked about the Insane difficulty level for Mass Effect 3 and how it would force all gamers try it to use all their tools to progress while Microsoft issued a stern statement saying that it had no plans to launch a new Xbox home console during this year.

Wednesday was dominated by the news that BioWare released yet another small patch for Star Wars: The Old Republic, labeled 1.1.1, which is designed to solve some of the problems introduced by the previous update while The Creative Assembly announced that Total War: Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai would arrive on March 23.

On Thursday, Microsoft was revealed by one analyst as being the company best positioned to dominate the next console generation as Nintendo struggles with the Wii U while Bethesda launched the much-awaited 1.4 patch for Skyrim and offered some more information on the Mod Workshop.

On Friday BioWare announced that it was delivering free Xbox Live memberships with the demo for Mass Effect 3 while Take Two released financial data but no information on when its big titles might be launched in 2012.

On Saturday, we got to see the first screenshots of The Last of Us as Kaz Hirai talked about the challenges facing Sony at the moment.