14 DAY TRIAL // 2012 is finally starting to become interesting in terms of video games and, apart from some significant announcement about future releases, this week we managed to get out gaming hands on Asura’s Wrath, which is very anime influenced, and on Final Fantasy XIII-2, which appears to be an evolution of the series concept, delivering Quick Looks for both of them.
We also continue to look at the year that stands mostly ahead of us and the results are included in the Incoming 2012 series of articles.
We also have a full Softpedia review for Rochard and a Quick Look for the beta stage of The Settlers Online.
And we also have a Weekend Reading piece about how big holiday sales like the recent one from Steam might actually end up hurting the industry and an EndWeekGame article that talks about what we plan to play during our free days.
And, as usual, we have a selection of the most important news from the past week.
On Monday we learned from one analyst that the PlayStation 4 from Sony and the Xbox 720 from Microsoft will be announced at this year’s E3 game show and will be out before the year is through while Best Buy put a launch date of February 1 on Diablo III before Blizzard stated that was not factually true.
On Tuesday Ken Levine of Irrational Games talked about how the voice actors for Elizabeth and Booker modified the narrative of BioShock Infinite while the developers released a new cinematic for Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City,
Wednesday brought news that id Software laid off a number of people as part of a normal business cycle but observed that Doom 4 development was not affected while Infinity Ward and Activision announced plans for nine months of new content for Modern Warfare 3.
Thursday we found out that Blizzard does not consider Diablo III to be officially in development for consoles while Radical Entertainment commented on the central conflict of Prototype 2.
On Friday BioWare offered details on the first big patch for the Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO while the NPD Group offered the disappointing figures for sales in the United States during December 2011.