Before I tear into 2012 titles like Alan Wake: Night Springs , Mass Effect 3 , BioShock: cs2 visual improvements 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

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

"The concept for LambdaGeneration was simple - we wanted to create a site that would share all of the amazing fan content the Half-Life and Valve community make," Alex says." At the time, most Valve fansites were focused on official news and there weren’t any news sites dedicated to things made by the community. I remember being frustrated seeing some really cool stuff scattered around various forums just going unnoticed, and I wanted to fix that.

"Reddit feels quite outdated," Alex tells me, "I personally find it hard to use, and I know many others do too. We wanted to build a modern site, more in line with the easy-to-use interface that people have come to expect from platforms like Twitter. The Half-Life subreddit also has a huge amount of meme content and while I enjoy a good meme, we want to appeal to serious content too. For example, last week we added a 'Fanart of the Week' section to our sidebar. We also noticed that a lot of people shared their work on our Discord and while it is great for discussion, it’s not intended for long-term archiving due to how quickly things get buried. We wanted to create a platform that was fully public, organized, and search engine-friendly."

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

With the sudden success of the Overwatch League and the decision by Activision to start one of their own with Call of Duty , rumors now indicate that Valve is thinking about starting a franchise league for Counter-Strike Global Offensive . We'll explore why this would be a very bad idea and discuss potential alternati

This month I'm looking forward to Mario Kart 7 . It's just one of those games that you can pickup and play whenever you want, and I plan on playing it throughout December and well into the new year. Since some folks are talking about what they're excited for next year, I'd have to say Halo 4 and Bioshock: Infinite are on the top of my l

As for the league, the next step in the process would depend on how many teams Valve ultimately allows, but let's just say there are twenty teams. Those same twenty teams could be split into two divisions of ten and then must earn a certain number of points within league play in order to maintain their spot. The ten lowest point earners would then have to take part in a relegation tournament whereby they would battle it out with a yet to be determined number of teams who have earned enough points from various tournaments to have their chance at earning a spot in the league. The league itself would play out much like ESL Pro league, being separate from all tournaments, having its own season and its own prize pool. Majors could still work in their current format, with points being assigned to current league holders that can be earned by teams who aren't in the league if they happen to defeat one of the league te

For example, when Tyloo started making its way to major tournaments, most teams played a slow and methodical version of Counter-Strike: GO , with the likes of Navi waiting until 30 seconds or less to execute onto a site. Tyloo, being based in Asia, played in a scrim-like style that was customary for their region, moving at a much faster pace than most top teams were used to seeing and catching them off guard. Soon after, you saw legendary teams like Liquid adopting some elements of Tyloo's playstyle into their own, helping them to eventually earn the top spot as the best t