Random House Publishing and Fantasy Flight Games have teamed up to release A World of Ice and Fire, a stunning guide to the people and places of Westeros.

While it's free to download, you're only given a limited selection of content; to unlock the full range of entries, you're going to have to pay. But that may well be worth it if you're the type to get lost while watching the show/reading the books, as the articles are detailed, have fantastic art (much of it from the official Fantasy Flight board game) and, best of all, many of them drop a pin on a map of the world to let you get your bearings.

George R. R. Martin's A World of Ice and Fire – A Game of Thrones Guide [iTunes]

It feels like an age ago, and in gaming terms I guess it was. The launch of PlayStation Home, one of the cornerstones of the PS3's launch era, was meant to usher in a new kind of online interaction. A place where the connectivity of Xbox Live could be turned into a virtual world, blurring the lines between community and the games they play.

And for a while, this was the case! Sony live-streamed press conferences and shows into the service (which to its credit it still does), Warhawk tried to bring its strategic features into Home, and most of the junk you could buy was related to video games.

But over the years, Home has changed. It never really caught on. It's a profitable service for Sony (and the third-party companies creating content for it), sure, and people use it, but it's hardly the bedrock of the PS3 community it was supposed to be. It's certainly no Xbox Live, and even Nintendo's fledgling online service seems to have more meat on its bones.

And yet it remains. So who, then, uses Home in 2012? If we're going by the weird shit that goes on sale every month for the service, I'd have to say... I have absolutely no idea.

Below you'll find some of the items and add-ons made available for sale in the service over the last year or so. Note that I'm not cherry-picking the weird/creepy ones; the kind of bizarre content here reflects a tone that's consistent throughout the offerings, which I think more than any survey or market research is able to sum up the kind of person using Home these days.

It's like someone took The Sims, smashed it together with late 90s-Eurotrash and added a dash of Second Life, just for colour. The results are, well, if nothing else the most unique and baffling array of content you'll find on any modern console.

I'm not saying that what Home's current users are doing or enjoying (or, to be more precise, buying) now is wrong. If you've found an online home and you're enjoying it, that's awesome! And if I sound condescending in any way, that's not my intent. Just because something is different doesn't mean it's worse. I've simply grown genuinely and increasingly fascinated by the shift in tone Home's gone through in the last few years.

But boy, I look at stuff like this and I wonder what Phil Harrison, the platform's champion, thinks. Because I bet when he helped launch Home in 2007, this was not what he had in mind.

These two charts turned up today, reportedly from a "recently scraped database of 24,000 videogames to determine percentages of genre and platform releases since 1975".

My inner stats nerd just fainted.

Charts like this can tell you a lot about games and the changing way we enjoy them, and even allowing for the fact it might be built on iffy data, there seem to be enough general trends checking out that it makes for closer reading.

The "arcade" sections on both make for grim/sad reading.

I Love Charts [Tumblr]

It might not be the most extensive of Skyrim mods, but it's certainly one of the most eye-catching. If, that is, you can bend your mind around to the fiction of the Star Wars and Elder Scrolls universes co-existing...

If you want to try it out, maybe add it to your need-to-install-these-mods list, you can grab it below.

Death Star Moon [Skyrim Nexus, thanks Mike!]

Disney's Wreck-it-Ralph is, in some ways, the best video game movie ever made. It doesn't do as much with the whole video games thing as it could have, but still, great movie.

One of the things it did really well was parody/pay homage to famous video game series and clichés without (usually) having to directly reference them. You can thank the flick's art department for that.

As you can see in these concept art images from the movie's pre-production, the artists had a very good handle on how to give StarCraft and Mario Kart the Disney treatment.

There are more images from Wreck-it-Ralph's pre-production available at Disney Animation's site (thanks Concept Art World!)

If you're lucky, or brave, your gamertag (or other similar account name) might be, well, your name. A few of my friends are like that. Chances are, though, you picked a fake handle and went with that instead.

That name might be insightful. Or clever. Or funny. Or, more likely, indecipherable and a little stupid.

Yet behind every stupid (or smart!) decision is a story, and we want to hear yours. I'll get the ball rolling.

Mine is...the sound a fish makes when you discover them in Wind Waker. A little silly, perhaps, but I've always enjoyed the fact it meant I never needed miscapitalised letters, underscores or numbers in the thing.

The video for Hot Chip's Don't Deny Your Heart starts out as a homage to FIFA, and the obsessive way many people play the game on the road.

Then things pick up a little, and suddenly it becomes a homage to FIFA's other key appeal: mouth kissing and loving embraces.

Hot Chip - Don't Deny Your Heart (Official) [YouTube]

Over Thanksgiving weekend, I rewatched The Lord of the Rings. It was partly because The Hobbit is almost upon us, and partly because I was in mourning having finished Persona 4 Golden and needed something to take my mind off missing Inaba.

After taking to Twitter (as you do), I learned that I wasn't the only one. In fact, a good number of people have recently rewatched Peter Jackson's epic trilogy over the last week or two. So, I thought I'd dedicate an off-topic post to sharing some thoughts about the trilogy these years later, and open it up to discussion.

My thoughts:

• I watched the extended versions, and I gotta say, I think that Fellowship has the best extended cut. The other two films suffer in comparison.
• The scene where Boromir says the now-iconic "One does not simply walk into Mordor" had me laughing much more than I thought it would. Oh, Boromir. You gave rise to so many Kotaku headlines that day.
• Even this many years later, the fight against the Balrog is super impressive. I wonder if it'll ever look dated.
• A couple other effects are showing their age, however, including some of the green-screening, and a few times when CGI Legolas pulls stunts.
• Speaking of stunts, the moves that wowed me when I first saw the movie—the reverse horse-mount, the shield-skateboarding—left me colder this time. They felt more like fan-service than anything. I think I've seen 'em too many times.
• LOVED Brad Dourif this time around in his role as Wormtongue. Since first seeing the film, I've developed a newfound appreciation for him through Deadwood (and he was also in Dishonored!) and it's so fun to see him be so pathetic and vile here.
• Something that's always bugged me: In Two Towers, Gandalf is like "Look to my coming at first light on the fifth day." But Aragorn isn't like "Wait, fifth from when? Is today the first day?" That'd be the first thing I'd ask. Communication is very important in times like this!
• The charge down the hill at the end of the battle of Helm's Deep remains as jaw-dropping today as it ever was. One of the most truly epic moments in film history.
• I had a good time on Twitter pointing out my favorite scenes. They follow:
• The part where Saruman calls Gandalf out for being a stoner
• The Scene Where Aragorn Eats The Stew And It's Gross But He's Cool About It
• The Part Where The Flaming Ent Dunks His Head In The Water
• The Part Where Smeagol Had The Same Creepy Voice Back When He Was Normal Even Though You'd Assumed The Ring Had Made It Creepy
• The Part Where Denethor Eats The Tomato
• The Part Where The Orcs In The Tower All Kill Each Other Because They're Just Such Assholes They Can't Help It
• The Part Where Frodo Looks Exactly Like Ellen Ripley
• The Part Where Aragorn Goes In With The Tongue In Front Of Everyone
• And of course, The Part Where Frodo Turns Around And Merry Is Crying, And You Start Crying Too

All in all a wonderful series of films, and if nothing else, you gotta admire the balls on Peter Jackson for the scale of some of the sequences. I can't imagine that The Hobbit will match it or really, even come close, but it will be fun to travel back to Middle-Earth one more time.

Anyone else out there recently rewatch LotR? What did you think? Do the movies hold up for you? Do you wish they'd left out some of the scenes added to the extended cut? Do you agree that during the final part in Mount Doom, Frodo totally looks like Ellen Ripley from Aliens?

Chat about lords, rings, or anything else, here or over in the Talk Amongst Yourselves forum. Have good chatting, see you tomorrow.

We chatted with film director Guillermo del Toro at the New York Comic-Con earlier this year, and he told us one of his dream jobs would be to make a movie with Valve.

Turns out the feeling's mutual.

In an interview with New Rising Media, Valve writer Marc Laidlaw outlined three directors who, for varying reasons, he thinks could all do a great job bringing Gordon Freeman's sci-fi adventures to the big screen.

"If Paul Verhoeven returned to science fiction films, he would do something insane with Half-Life… maybe something objectionably insane, but at least not boring", he says. "Peter Jackson has proved himself an amazing purveyor of faithful adaptations. Guillermo del Toro has the horror vibe that I think a lot of people miss out on when thinking about a Half-Life movie. Half-Life is essentially horror after all. The science in it barely passes as hand-waving, but when a headcrab jumps at your head, it's a precisely engineered jolt. There are probably a lot of good potential directors, but I think most of them are busy pursuing their own visions."

Man, a Paul Verhoeven—he of RoboCop and Total Recall fame—Half-Life movie... what a thing that would be.

Interview With Marc Laidlaw: The Writer Of Half-Life [New Rising Media, via PC Gamer]

Among the many things I like about the wonderful Far Cry 3, one of the most remarkable is how polished it all is. This is an ambitious, massive game, so it's all the more noteworthy that everything works so well.

Ubisoft Montreal has nailed all the big stuff, sure—combat is punchy and fluid, guns feel great, stealth is consistent and fun, and traversal feels grounded and solid. But they've also gotten so many little things right, and it's in those details that Far Cry 3 truly sets itself apart.

Of all things, the climbing encapsulates the game's polish for me. Check out the video above—you're walking along, and you'll see these vines hanging down from a cliff. Obviously, they're a subtle signpost indicating that they can be climbed. Up we go.

But where most games would have you scale the wall while a climbing sound plays, likely skating above the vines, Far Cry 3 goes the extra mile. Jason Brody's hands actually grasp the thickest vine and climb it all the way up. Check out how he flattens his hand when he reaches the top, levering himself up realistically. Then, on the way back down, he braces his legs and slides.

It's in the little things, the believable physicality of Jason's movements, that Far Cry 3 sets itself apart from most shooters. In the past, only Call of Duty games have so realistically placed you within the shoes of your protagonist. I'd argue that Far Cry 3 outdoes even Call of Duty in this respect. Comparisons notwithstanding, it's just nice to play a big-budget game that is both this open-ended and this polished, and Ubisoft's attention to detail is simply one more reason Far Cry 3 is such a resounding success.