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A demo for spooky Kinect game Rise of Nightmares has been added to Xbox Live Marketplace.

BioWare has explained the recent spate of Star Wars: The Old Republic bans - and promised to adjust areas players are exploiting.

The best-selling UK video game during the last week of 2011 was FIFA 12.

Rock hard downloadable game Super Meat Boy has sold over one million copies, developer Team Meat has revealed.

The 3DS sold more in its first nine months than Wii did in the US, Nintendo has announced.

The most pirated PC game of 2011 wasn't Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3 or Skyrim - it was Crysis 2.

Downloadable action game Bastion has sold over half-a-million copies, developer Supergiant Games has announced.

Epic Mickey 2 has been revealed by a Disney newsletter.

3D Classics Kid Icarus launches this Thursday as part of the first Nintendo eShop update of 2012.

Huge BioWare MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic is estimated to have as many as 350,000 gamers playing together at once.

Sega has unveiled Sonic 4 Episode 2 with a new teaser trailer, below.

Ling Xiaoyu and M. Bison are playable characters in Street Fighter x Tekken.

You'd probably prefer it if I didn't mention World of Warcraft in this review. Seven years on and it's getting boring, I have to agree. But that's tough for both of us, because Star Wars: The Old Republic wouldn't exist without Blizzard's online world, and it's impossible to discuss without referring to it. There are two elephants in this room.

As you've probably spotted, we've spent the last week since we broke up for Christmas publishing personal accounts of some of our favourite games of the last 12 months, and we've also named our overall Game of the Year for 2011: Valve's wonderful Portal 2.

Was 2011 a great year for gaming or wasn't it? Regardless of where you stand on that particular debate, it's been responsible for some of the medium's finest efforts. Going through our Games of 2011 has provided some heartening reading, and the likes of Bastion, Quarrel and Clash of Heroes HD go to show that when it comes to "Actual New Games" we've had our fair share over the last 12 months.

Thanks to quirks of the calendar and the narrowing technological gap between the devices in our pockets and those lingering under our TVs, the latest instalment of the Uncharted action-adventure series arrives barely two months after we reviewed the last one, Drake's Deception, and doesn't look all that different. Even by the Call of Duty-regurgitating, never-knowingly-not-a-sequel standards of the modern video games industry, that's an impressive rate of iteration.

Xenoblade Chronicles isn't the best-made game released this year. It's not quite my personal favourite, either. It's not the greatest role-playing game in what was surely a banner year for the genre; nor is it the most exciting new game from Japan or the most welcome comeback. It's not even the best Wii game of 2011. But it was something none of those games were: a lovely surprise.

So what's your favourite Christmas game? One you played at yuletide, rather than actually based on the festive season, that is. You have one, naturally. All gamers do.

A hazy myth, an elegant contraption, an eccentric vision, an unforgiving mistress: Dark Souls has many sides. All bear the fingerprints of creator Hidetaka Miyazaki, who in 2011 established himself as the most interesting designer working in blockbuster games today. Not that this, sequel to Sony-born Demon's Souls, has much aside from giant sales figures to identify it as a big hitter. In all other ways it eschews the churning mainstream, taking design decisions that are both unfashionable and, prior to its chart-dominating success, seemingly commercially unworkable.

Did you know that there's a new Mission: Impossible film out this Christmas? I had no idea until the other day. I assume they must have masses of advertising running for that on TV, in cinemas, online and "outdoors" (I eventually spotted it on a train station poster), but despite spending most of my life hanging off the digital world like a conjoined foetus, somehow its existence had passed me by.

SPOILER ALERT!: This piece contains story spoilers - from the very first sentence onwards.

It's Nottingham, the end of a crisp autumn day, and Eric Chahi's smile is as bright as the late October sun - although his is a face that seems reluctant to ever frown.

You can tell everything about Portal 2 from the lack of cake. There's one gag in the whole game, and it's a fakeout - a door marked 'cake dispensary' that, if approached, falls flat on the ground. Portal was too perfect and its punishment was death by meme, the inane chanting that transforms a joke into a catchphrase. Portal 2 doesn't preach to the converted and retread past glories - the cake doesn't matter. And nor does much else.

Playing Quarrel for the first time is one of the strangest gaming experiences I've had for a while, and it was definitely unrelated to the 12th cup of tea of the day. Sometimes games feel so familiar and perfectly formed that you assume that you must have played them before in some nascent form, possibly sometime in the late 1980s before mullets were officially outlawed.

It feels very appropriate to be writing about Mario in the run up to Christmas. Even though his games make no explicit reference to The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, and in fact are often blatantly summery with their primary colours and warm blue skies, there's just something inherently festive about the squat plumber and his surreal world.

About once a year, a game makes me want to write.

Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes is a game. You know, like chess, or backgammon, or tic-tac-toe, or, heck, Kerplunk. There are two sides in play, you take it in turns to make your move and success demands skill, concentration and, occasionally, a dash of luck.

If golf is a good walk spoiled, StreetPass Quest might be the exact opposite. It's a good walk enhanced: a simple amble across town rendered tactical, speculative and even quietly thrilling. "Gather heroes, fight ghosts and collect hats," says the blurb that introduces the 3DS' unlikely killer app. Sold. As far as I'm concerned, that's pretty much the entire appeal of modern video games boiled down into a single sentence.

Maybe I'm being wilfully perverse. It wouldn't be the first time. If the game of the week were determined by buzz or importance or sheer weight of numbers - of players, of man-years of effort, of many millions of dollars in budget, of hours of queuing for a precious spot on a live server - then this week it would unquestionably belong to Star Wars: The Old Republic.

UPDATE 2: Breathe easy, seems it was all a mix up. GameSpot just issued the following statement: