Joellen Prins

December is the month that bats clean up for gamers, allowing us a chance to catch up on all the titles we missed this year. Among those titles I missed are Skyrim, Skyward Sword, and Battlefield 3 , so I hope to give those a go over the break. On top of that I'm also looking forward to finally procuring a 3DS and trying out Super Mario 3D Land and Mario Kart 7 . And for my family fun I'm looking forward to checking out Scene It? Movie Night . Happy Holidays RantAlex 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.Half-Life fans are a dedicated bunch. Even in the absence of content from Valve , the series has thrived with mods, community content, and unofficial games such as Lambda Wars and Black Mesa. Half-Life: Alyx didn’t fully reignite the torch, but it helped to keep the flame fans have managed to carry all these years flickering. There were community forums of like-minded individuals sharing each other’s work, news websites specifically catering to Valve fans after Episode 3 faded into obscurity, and then there was LambdaGeneration. This, doubled with the game's wildly difficult execution, makes the game one of the hardest for newcomers to approach in the fighting game scene. KoF XV has tons of pretzel inputs that are physically hard to pull off, and can lead to injured wrists if done too often or incorrectly. All in all, KoF XV is a fun yet brutal game for newcomers to le 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 reading this 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 Choosing to go to A or B may make the difference between losing a life and achieving the objective. Since the map Inferno has two spread out bomb sites, players on the defending side are well advised to place half their players at each site. Since planters can stick together and follow the same route, Inferno is deemed to be T sided. The map design of Inferno is not bad, but in practice, the map just misses the mark. Despite its flaws, people will continue to play and enjoy Infe Non-game related gambling remained rampant on the Twitch service despite the aforementioned controversy, with gambling content quickly rising to be one of the most popular topics on Twitch in recent years. With the rise of cryptocurrency coming hand-in-hand with increased attention on gambling on the Twitch platform, the marriage of the two controversial subjects seemed like an inevitability to many view"Contrary to what people may think, LambdaGeneration actually grew during Valve’s silence," Alex explains. "Many of the news-oriented sites that once overshadowed us started to struggle - many just gave up. The community, however, did not." Counter Strike: Global Offensive has often been a source of gambling-related controversy, and so it is no wonder that this inevitably translated over to the Twitch platform. CSGO's case unboxing system provides a small opportunity for players to possibly receive items worth huge amounts of real-world money and was one of the first titles to really spark widespread discourse surrounding this kind of "soft gambling" that was going unchecked within the video game indus Weapons sway more when aimed down sights, making even simple shots hard to pull off, and the map is filled with sound traps that reveal positions to other teams in a heartbeat. The overall flow and strategy of Hunt make it one of the hardest yet most satisfying games for newcomers to le Who says there are no good games released in December? Mario Kart 7 , Nintendo's latest entry into it's iconic racing franchise is coming this year, and it's coming to a 3DS. What better way to ignore family at those tedious holiday get togethers than by racing down Rainbow Road? Still not sold? Well maybe you should check out our Mario Kart 7 review to see why this is one of the 3DS' hottest tit What will you be playing this month and what are you looking forward to come 2012? Follow us on Twitter @ GameRant or like us on Facebook and let us know, or just leave a comment down below! And from everyone here at Game Rant, have a safe and happy holid