E-sports’ growing popularity among spectators shows no sign of slowing down. The MLG have posted some remarkable figures from the 2011 season. Around 3.5 million unique viewers in total have tuned into MLG Pro Circuit weekends this season. The Pro Circuit National Championships in Providence, Rhode Island drew more than quarter of a million concurrent viewers at peak times, from 175 different countries.

Things have come a long way since Max monologued his way through the first game wearing this facial expression. Three of the four new screenshots show close-ups of Max’s three new looks. There’s the youthful Don Draper Max, washed up beard-of-sorrow max and Stone Cold Steve Austin Max, all looking mean, all firing guns. What do you think of the new Max? Get ready to judge his face. Three, two, one … GO!

Bioware recently threw open the gates of The Old Republic to anyone who wanted to try it out. The stress test initially put tremendous strain on the servers, but testers still managed to put in 12 hours of play each on average across the weekend. 725,000 testers logged in over Thanksgiving weekend, clocking up more than nine million hours between them.

Shut the shops down, people, Christmas is solved. Mojang have successfully pitched the idea for Lego Minecraft on Lego Cuusoo, a site that lets visitors vote on their favourite Lego prototypes. The sets aren’t in full production yet, but the idea has been so popular that the Cuusoo site has been struggling to deal with the traffic since Mojang man Daniel Kaplan tweeted about the project.