A Gamer's Week: January 1

This is the last A Gamer’s Week round-up of 2011, yet it appears on the very first day of 2012 because of the quirks of the calendar and it comes complete with the final few entries of our Softpedia 2011 Game of the Year series and with a full review for Anno 2070, the rather impressive city builder from Ubisoft that is a slow, serious experience to enjoy over the holidays.

We also have two Weekend Reading features, both of them dealing to how we see 2011 through our gamer eyes.

There’s also a EndWeekGame article that deals with the way we plan to engage with games during this extended weekend period, which will also be filled with drinks and friends.

And, as always, we have a selection of the most important news, limited as they were, from the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.

On Monday we were off, still digesting heavy food and catching up on lost sleep, but on Tuesday we talked about a new racing simulation game for the PC, called Assetto Corsa, which will challenge established brands like Need for Speed and Gran Turismo, while Sony revealed some information about the initial design choices it made for the PlayStation Vita handheld, which is now out in Japan.

Wednesday brought a new Star Wars: The Old Republic patch, bringing the MMO to version 1.01, with the developers at BioWare fixing some of the most glaring bugs as it begins the long support process for the game.

On the same day Gearbox unveiled a number of details about the new Gunzerker class for the upcoming Borderlands 2, allowing players to get an idea about how the skills will affect gameplay.

On Thursday Valve again denied all the rumors swirling around about Half-Life 3, saying that it was just a case of the community fooling itself, while Silicon Knights suffered a setback when it came to the lawsuit it launched against Epic Games over Unreal Engine 3 and Too Human.

On Friday the Defense Ministry in the United Kingdom has talked about how modern shooter like Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 make it hard to recruits to engage with its own virtual simulation training space while analysts talked about the possible future of gaming.