I think I see Aliens

Right now - this very instant - you can get 25x Experience Points in Gears of War 2, including Horde Mode. Epic Games promised a 1x multiplier for every thousand Facebook fans, and they're delivering. This trumps July's 20x XP weekend and lays track for the Gears of War 3 hype train - it's a good time to be a Gears fan.

"Saber Interactive's Inversion makes no bones about looking exactly like Gears of War," says EuroGamer's Tom Bramwell in their latest preview. According to the article, the controls are cloned over as well. Whether this works to Inversion's advantage or detriment remains to be seen. If nothing has changed since the last time we've given the game coverage, then it seems that the lack of splitscreen co-op (online only) is one thing that deviates from the Gears of War formula of success.

Welcome to Beyond Co-Op, a weekly piece that talks about industry stories that may or may not be related to co-op gaming.

I'm pretty sure there's a song about the triumph of love, if not, the above screenshot should inspire someone to write it - that is if GlaDOS hasn't already.  There's no lying about these Portal 2 screens - they look absolutely gorgeous showing off the game's co-op mode.

Sadly our PAX 2010 edition is free from the staff at PAX.  Babies, personal commitments, time and money all added to Co-Optimus not being at its favorite gaming show of the year.  To make matters worse, we're missing Duke.  Duke, friggin Nukem, fuggin Forever.  Gah!  We'll be bringing you coverage as we can this weekend of the goodies from the show.

There are those that said this day would never come.

Red 5 Studios have announced a brand new massively multiplayer shooter called Firefall which will focus on team based and cooperative based gameplay.  The studio, founded by World of Warcraft lead developer Mark Kern and Starsiege Tribes lead designer Scott Young, plans to release the game late next year on the PC utilizing a free to play model.

Shank is a game about a guy name Shank who shanks a lot of guys. It’s probably the most appropriate title for a game in recent memory. It is a story of revenge, mistaken identity and a whole lot of sticking sharp things into the soft parts of bad guys.

If you missed getting your hands on Battlefield: Bad Company 2 earlier this year, now's your chance to snag the game with all the included DLC - including the co-op mode -  for the "ultimate" price of $59.99 on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Ace Combat: Joint Assault launched into the unfriendly skies of the PlayStation Portable this week and co-op gamers are tasked with teaming up with pals to bring down the bad guys. If you haven't snagged the game yet, you're in luck, because we've been provided with copies of the game to giveaway.

Kalypso Media and Haemimont Games have announced a closed beta test for the upcoming two player co-op game, The First Templar.  The beta test is for the Windows version of the game, an Xbox 360 version is also planned, both will be out in early 2011.