The Game Rant Game Guide: December 2011 & Beyond Edition

"The Half-Life community is one of the most creative and talented Gaming community backlash communities out there," the founder of LambdaGeneration - who simply goes by "Alex" online - tells me. "Some of the stuff we cover just blows my mind. Whether it’s a group of people spending almost two decades recreating the original game in a modern engine or someone spending three months on a fan film, I am always taken aback by the sheer dedication people have for the series."

Gambling services such as Stake.com have risen dramatically in popularity and spending power in recent years, allowing players to gamble with the cryptocurrency of their choice. This popularity allowed crypto gambling services to offer extremely lucrative sponsorship deals for big-time streamers to gamble on their websites. For example, popular streamer Adin Ross was reportedly being paid upwards of $900,000 a week to play on Stake.com, meaning a glaring and massive vested interest was pres

Oh, December. The month when I despair of ever playing all of the games I missed during November. The only new game on my radar for the rest of the year is Mario Kart 7 . Otherwise, it's all about catching-up. Lord of the Rings: War in the North, Forza Motorsport 4, and Kinect Sports Season 2 continue to be the go-to games in my house, but Rayman: Origins and Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword top the list of games I can't wait to get lost in over the holidays. I'm also really liking what I've seen of the new SSX -- if I could play any of next year's games right now, that would be the

Websites quickly began exploiting the craze surrounding Counter Strike 's in-game items, with sites like CSGO Lotto allowing players to trade their items for eligibility into raffles for extremely valuable prizes. Many streamers began promoting these kinds of websites, often without disclosing their financial stakes in the services they were promoting. For example, popular streamer Phantoml0rd was famously permanently banned from Twitch for just this reason, despite later winning a civil suit against the platform. Twitch would quickly go on to ban these kinds of raffle or gambling websites related to CSGO , marking one of the first major gambling controversies for the serv

Alex was driven by all of these approaches to bring everything together into one central hub for all things community. "One huge inspiration was PlanetPhillip.com, now RunThinkShootLive," he tells me, "The site posted reviews of single-player Half-Life maps. I could see how much of a positive impact that had on the community. People were inspired to create Half-Life maps because they could see others making cool stuff and they knew their effort would not go to waste. There seemed to be room for something that could do the same for everything else in the community like fan art, fan films, music, and mods.

Of course, since I compared it to Max Payne, you should know that it has bullet time and more bullet time-esque features. It has everything a mindless, fun game would need: bad-ass main character (voiced/modeled after Chow Yun Fat)? Check! Gratifying violence? Check! Over the top action sequences? Check! Solid controls? Ch

Vagrant Story is my second choice. For starters, it is a Square game, and all of them get sequels. The hero, Ashley Riot, finds himself in a mystery of murder all while having his memories altered. The internal struggle of Ashley trying to figure out his real goal was quite emotio

Following intense subsequent pressure from the community on what was already a longstanding controversy, Twitch has banned most forms of gambling from the service , with the aforementioned crypto-gambling giant Stake.com being a named company that is no longer welcome on the streaming platform. This is enormous news for the company considering just how popular gambling streams are on the service, with streamers and fans on both sides of the argument continuing in intense deb

"Moving to Twitter and YouTube was a must to survive. I love old-school websites and forums, but it’s hard to keep them alive in the modern internet era. We actually used Twitter early on to promote articles on the original site but, over time, we transitioned to posting directly in smaller bites, which worked well for us."

The game originally came out in 1999 as a Half-Life mod and in 2000 as separate retail. That's over a decade! The potential of what a new release would look like seems amazing in terms of graphics, mechanics and the all-around evolution of video games since then. I know I'm not alone, there's even a Facebook group devoted to the ca

Before I tear into 2012 titles like Alan Wake: Night Springs , Mass Effect 3 , BioShock: Infinite , SSX , and Borderlands 2 , it's time for me to play catch-up after a busy November of reviews. I managed to resist the pull of both Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 , though it will be a holiday miracle if I don't end up caving this month and enlisting in one or the other military campaign. However, more importantly, I'm about to return to the hallowed halls of the assassins for Assassins' Creed: Revelations . Desmond's fourth trip into the Animus was one of my most anticipated titles of 2011 and I'm fully committed to becoming a master assassin - as well as collecting all the miscellaneous garbage Ubisoft has scattered around Constantinople. I've also got to clean-up some collectibles as well as pawn n00bs in a few of October/November's biggest titles, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception and Gears of War 3 . That, and I'm going to dance my heart out in Dance Central 2 - and if high scores and smooth dance moves aren't enough motivation, I've got a bet to