Game prices drop faster than ever, and with every retailer in the country fighting each other for your gaming dollar the deals can be hard to believe during the holiday season. This is the time to put your gift cards, stockings filled with cash, and perhaps even returns to good use to get the games you really want, and you may be able to get away with spending much less than you had assumed.

This is the place to share the sales, deals, and coupons that you find in your travels around the Internet. Is your favorite game on sale? Let us know why you loved it and where we can get it for cheap. Is your favorite retailer running a two-for-one deal? This is the place to let us know. We'll get you started, but we can't wait to see what deals you guys are able to dig up.

I know we've now run two trailers in as many days—and I promise that we're not moving in a bold new direction of showing more commercials—but both of these pieces of content are explosive, for different reasons. Prometheus began life as a prequel to Ridley Scott's Alien, but became something different in production. The first trailer for the movie is here, and you can watch it after the break or catch the high-definition version that should be available soon, but I think you'll agree that the Alien franchise is about to get another entry, even if no one can admit it.

Take a look.

The PlayStation was launched in September of 1995, and Warhawk was released that November. The game may have shown off two goofy pilots during the full-motion video cinemas, but the real "star" of the game was what you flew, a vertical take off and landing (VTOL) craft that bore a striking resemblance to the dropship shown in James Cameron's Aliens film. You flew the ship through a series of missions against an evil dictator named Kreel.

It's hard to watch videos of the game or look at screenshots and see the graphics through the eyes of a gamer from 1995. The 3D gameplay was amazing at the time; in the very first level you could fly around a large open space and pick off targets in any order, while fighting off other ships and stationary defenses. The attacks came in waves, and as you blew up targets a large pyramid was uncovered in the middle of the level—and of course you had to blow it up. It felt like we were playing the future.

It's amazing what a strong setting can do for a game. Unstoppable Gorg is Futuremark's newest title, and with a release on the PC, Xbox Live Arcade, and the iOS platform it's a much less ambitious project than the zero-g shooter Shattered Horizon. Giving the game such an iconic feeling is a smart move, as inventive games like this have done much to prove that the tower defense genre still has room to grow.

Unstoppable Gorg takes place in the pulpy world of classic sci-fi movies, complete with wailing theremins and busty dames. The aesthetics immediately set the game apart from other tower defense titles.

Peter Jackson's take on the Hobbit won't be hitting theaters until December of next year, but there is now an official trailer that offers a sense of how the movie will look. Martin Freeman, from the original Office series on BBC and the latest film adaptation of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, plays a young Bilbo Baggins.  

Watching the trailer, I started with the sense that the film seems to have a lighter, almost slapstick feel in places. Then, of course, things got somber. Take a look for yourself.

It's hard to look back on any year of gaming and try to pull out the best and worst games, but that's not going to stop us from trying. Any list of this kind is by definition subjective, but these are the gaming experiences that stuck with the editors of Ars Technica, Wired magazine, and wired.com. They are the ones we think define 2011: the games that stumbled and the ones that soared.

Let us know what you think, what we missed, and what choices make you shake your head in anger. Sure, there were games that let us down, but we'd argue that the important part of the list are the best games. If you haven't ripped into these games yet, it's a good time to start.

The PlayStation Vita is now available in Japan, and early adopters are reporting problems with their systems. The number of complaints about unresponsive systems or even frozen hardware has caused Sony to issue a patch to update the Vita, as well as an apology for the issues experienced by gamers. This isn't the best start for a dedicated gaming platform in the world of smartphone gaming.