In the words of Frank Sinatra, 2011 "was a very good year" for Lord of the Rings Online. Executive Producer Kate Paiz and Director of Communications Adam Mersky sat down with us to talk about the future of the game, but before they got to the juicy details, they wanted to give a quick recap of the previous year for the game and the studio.

The big emphasis for LotRO in 2011 was the unifying of the global community and the release of the game's third (and best-selling) expansion, Rise of Isengard. While the aforementioned unification of the NA and EU sides of the game presented many challenges for the team including localization, it paid off in spades. Turbine plans to continue to add more payment options for those used to methods other than the ones currently available. The team was most proud of unveiling Saruman "in all of his glory" and the inclusion of free players into the sphere of Monster Play.

"The game definitely grew last year," Mersky said in response to a question about the current number of players. He noted that the playerbase has changed somewhat in the past two years, becoming more casual in some respects.

But it's time to move forward! Turbine is prepared to take LotRO players on a dizzying chase around the wilds of Middle-earth with a few significant changes and additions to the game -- and the release of the brand-new expansion later this year, Riders of Rohan. Mounted combat, ho!

Despite those signs from Sega's abdomen and the worried look on its face, it seems like Aliens: Colonial Marines isn't bursting out of development onto retail shelves any time soon. The game will now arrive some time in "fall 2012," according to a statement released by Sega this evening, bumping it a full season away from its originally intended spring 2012 window.

We're also told that a fancy new trailer for the game will be arriving tomorrow, so, uh, hold onto your butts! Oh ... shoot ... wrong franchise. Ummm, get to the choppah? Sorry, we kinda exhausted our Aliens references in the first paragraph. 

Mojang mastermind Notch has tweeted that Minecraft has reached the 20 million user milestone, and that if each user weighed 154 pounds, that Minecraft's total player base would equal 25 percent of the weight of the Great Pyramid of Giza. It's an interesting statistic, if somewhat of a stretch, only because it got us thinking about other ways to arbitrarily compartmentalize that sort of information.

For example: Assuming that every Minecraft player contains the human average of 1.3 gallons of blood, Minecraft's player base equates to 39.9 regulation olympic-sized swimming pools full of vital fluids. Math is neat, isn't it?

A brief teaser trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man (above) promises a more amazing look at the game with this weekend's VGAs. There's also a new official site to poke around, if that's your thing. We imagine you like web sites.

The Amazing Spider-Man is slated to launch alongside the movie next summer and serves as an epilogue to the film. It brings back the free-roaming web-slinging of games past, with a story penned by Seamus Kevin Fahey, who's written for TV shows including Battlestar Galactica.