This is going to be a big year for Silent Hill fans. A new title Silent Hill: Downpour is on the way, Silent Hill 2 and 3 are getting a loving HD re-release, and a new movie will be hitting screens (ok, so based on the last one a new movie might not necessarily be great news, but it’s still a big year). There’s going to be a lot of Silent Hill talk clogging up the interwebs in the coming months and justifiably so.

In the words of legendary MC Maestro Fresh Wes, “This is a throw-down, a show-down hell no, I can't slow down. It's gonna go!” Dancing games have come a long way since I first saw some kids stomping their feet to the beats of the pioneering Dance Dance Revolution. Long gone are the days of simply stepping on a dance pad while arrows scroll across the screen. These days if you really want to get your groove on there is no finer way than by using the Kinect motion controller.

I surprised myself over the last couple of weeks by experiencing a sharp, penetrating sensation that wasn’t my appendix rupturing. Instead, it was a long buried sense of anticipation, a particular giddiness that feels a little bit like a kid realizing he just might get the #1 toy on his Christmas wishlist. For me, this feeling came when it was announced that XCOM: Enemy Unknown was an actual game, in development that was going to respect the roots of the original. It is, for better or worse, going to be a strategy game, on consoles as well as the PC, that is turn-based.

Over the last few months, I’ve been catching up with some of the older games of the past generation, replaying HD collections of classics like Ico, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and most recently, Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus.

Now that we’ve all had plenty of opportunity to read over Best of 2011 lists from every publication caring to compile them, the first week of 2012 seems like an appropriate time to do a neck-twisting look back at the year just passed and forward at the one to come. 2011 was either a landmark in quality game releases or 12 months of atrophy depending on who you ask (I’d lean toward the former view) but, regardless of your own perspective, now’s the best time to look ahead and see how the recent past could — and should — affect 2012.