The Game Rant Game Guide: December 2011 & Beyond Edition

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

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

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

Maps in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive are mostly new, but some of the classics from Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike 2 updates: Source have been remade for CS: GO . If you’re like many CS: GO players, you’ve played the game for over 100 hours. This is ranking the 10 best Counter-Strike: Global Offensive m

Some would consider Cache to be the greatest Counter-Strike: Global Offensive map . The ingenuity behind Cache allows for sniping, but not a lot. Watch out for mid in Cache because that is where snipers like to camp. For the most part, battles on the map Cache are fought in close-quarters. With a shipping container placed beside A site, Cache can end with intense firefights where members of the attacking team try to stall for time, hiding behind the shipping container. The catwalk behind B is often a good place to camp. A’s bomb site is also close-quarter battles, so you may want to stock up on grena

Tekken has been one of the most consistently popular fighting games in the genre. The 3D fighter features beautiful graphics and a huge roster of unique characters to choose from. Save for a few exceptions like Super Smash Bros , fighting games are often very hard for newcomers to come into. There is a ton of information to learn, and it can even be hard just choosing a charac

It is fascinating that before even mentioning the skill-based aspects of matchmaking, it is behavior associated with cheating or what we could interpret as toxicity is addressed first. Obviously there needs to be a focus on isolating cheaters from non-cheaters, but one might have guessed that skill would have taken a predominate spot in determining the Trust Factor for placing one player with similarly skilled oth

The Twitch platform has been no stranger to controversy historically, with the wide-ranging avenues of entertainment that streamers engage in inevitably dredging up questions of morality and disagreements among the streaming giant’s viewers. As the platform has grown in recent years, so too has the frequency of large-scale controversies and the potential implications they could have on impressionable audien

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

December is relax time for me. It’s the first month in a while where I play games for fun instead of for review purposes. I plan to journey on in my restart of Skyrim on PC and make time to catch up on a large pile of games, including Saints Row: The Third, Battlefield 3 (PC) and Forza Motorsport 4 while making sure I begin Arkham City, Assassin’s Creed Revelations and Uncharte

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