The Week in Review: Thats totes Metal Gear Solid 5 edition

Much of this week's excitement came even before it had properly begun, with the reveal of what may well end up being Metal Gear Solid 5 during the Spike TV Video Game Awards in the early hours of Saturday morning.

The game was announced as The Phantom Pain, but internet detectives quickly worked out that this may well be a ruse. The demo was apparently running on tech equivalent to current generation hardware, and was easily the most impressive thing to come out of the VGAs.

The Last of Us was confirmed for a worldwide release on May 7, 2013 which is a bit later than many PlayStation gamers will have been hoping for. Still, it gives us a fantastic looking game to play just before the next generation is revealed at E3... right?

We also got a bunch of new trailers and the announcement of Dark Souls 2 - the latter has already got fans concerned it may be too easy, and therefore too much fun.

After all that excitement Monday morning's chart update did nothing to warm our frozen extremities, with Black Ops 2 clinging on at the top for a fourth successive week. Another game which has been selling well since its launch is Assassin's Creed 3, which according to Ubisoft has now shifted a franchise record of 7 million copies in just one month – and that's copies in customers' hands, not shipped to retailers.

While Black Ops 2 and Assassin's Creed 3 have been selling by the bucket load, Funcom's EA published MMO The Secret World finally admitted the subscription model wasn't working out so has gone free-to-play – proper free-to-play too, not that pretty awful implementation found in Star Wars: The Old Republic. You still need to buy the game, but from then on you're good to go. Matt's even started playing again, but is moaning because he's forgotten how to do stuff.

Fan uproar over the BioShock: Infinite cover art was eased somewhat when Irrational Games announced it will be shipping the title with a reversible cover decided upon by a fan vote. They'll also be a host of downloadable alternate covers available for those unhappy with the two included with the retail release.

Our recent interview with Crytek also delivered a few news nuggets in which the Crysis developer said that it had pretty much maxed out what it can do with the current consoles, and warned that the rising cost of components will have an impact on the specification of the next generation systems. Talk of 8GB of memory did get us very excited, however.

Most out of the blue news of the week came from EA which announced Kinect voice control support for Dead Space 3, a feature we're confident will convince at least one person to buy the game, but hundreds more to give it a miss.

The team continues to pump out thoughts on our Game of the Year contenders, presented in a Advent Calendar style. We'll be continuing with these right up until December 24 so be sure to check back daily for a new game.

I'm off to curl up into a pre-Xmas Cadbury's Festive Friends-induced coma – biscuit and chocolate has never tasted better.