Right before PAX Prime kicked off, Monolith invited Co-Optimus to their studio in Kirkland, WA to check out the latest build of Guardians of Middle-Earth.  The game was a surprise to us at E3, bringing the MOBA genre to the console while combining it with the LOTR license.  So Mike and Nick braved the Washington traffic and headed into the studio eager to see how the game has progressed...and hoping to get a glimpse of a SHOGO sequel.  One out of two ain’t bad.

Valve launched their Steam Greenlight service last week to the masses with the goal of getting a spotlight on promising indie titles.  Once it launched though, the unmoderated service quickly filled with spam type postings and the good content started to get lost in the shuffle.  Valve has since implemented a $100 barrier of entry which should help a bit, but indie developers like Brain Shape Games still need your help to get noticed.

Alright, so the Steam version of Kung Fu: Strike the Warrior's Rise failed to impress me as a game, co-op or otherwise when I reviewed it last month. But only PC gamers could really understand my suffering; everyone could only imagine. Well, the Xbox Live Arcade version finally launched today, which means roundhouse kicks and air dashes for all!

We first played The Bethemoth's BattleBlock Theater way back at PAX East 2011, seems like ages ago. While the campaign mode and many of the challenges are cooperative, The Behemoth actually prefers the term "co-optional", as screwing with your friends is just as important to the game as working with them. For instance: need to get across a pit of spikes? Chuck your unsuspecting friend into it and use their corpse as a platform, of course! 

Dogfight 1942 is a downloadable game that seemingly snuck up on us out of nowhere.  The title from City Interactive is an arcade style aerial combat game which features a series of campaign missions as well as survival scenarios that you can take on by yourself or with a friend in split-screen co-op.

Borderlands 2 is only a couple of weeks away from release, and the itch to play the game is overwhelming. To make matters worse, we watched a video like the one in this article of our own free will. For any co-op gamer, it’s useful for both extreme relief and extreme torture, seeing only a small portion of how much co-op potential the game has. All we want to do is play it in the very near future.

We've seen very little about Warface, the free to play shooter coming from Crytek on the PC.  To my surprise the game was already playable on the show floor of PAX 2012, despite only just being announced for Western territories.  The booth boasted five PCs to play the game's co-op mode so I dove right in.

Just last week, Happy Wars, one of the only two games to be a part of the first free-to-play program to be experimented with by Microsoft, has opened up its beta for those looking to take on gobs of players in one, giant, co-op brawl. What’s more awesome to hear is that anyone who is an Xbox LIVE Gold member can go on a download the title (along with Ascend: New Gods) absolutely free and play with others online. Micro-transactions will be available, however, in both games, but you won’t have to purchase anything to enjoy this co-op game.

Insomniac's first multiplatform game was announced at E3 in 2011, but it was surprisingly absent at 2012's show.  Overstrike was announced as a four player co-op action game being published by EA, which is reason enough to be excited, but with the Insomniac name behind it we're chomping at the bit.

Sacred 2: Fallen Angel was a co-op darling around the Co-Optimus community.  The Action/RPG provided a rich campaign with plenty of character classes, loot, and a variety of massive environments to experience it in.  The game did well critically and most likely financially, so there's no surprise that a sequel is in the works.  We sat in for a live co-op demo of Sacred 3 at PAX this past weekend and came away quite surprised as to where the series appears to be heading.

Running Co-Optimus is definitely a unique task within this industry.  It's not like other gaming news sites in that it's pretty obvious when you can cover a game.  An Xbox devoted site, for instance, always knows when a game is on the platform.  A racing game fan site knows when a game is about driving cars.  Co-Op though, isn't always cut and dry - and in the world of video game PR  - revealing your game has co-op isn't always in the cards until much later after a game is announced. 

2010's War for Cybertron is among my favorite games of this console generation. A solid three-player co-op campaign would have been good on its own, but throw in a robust set of multiplayer options, including Escalation mode, a survival mode for up to four, and you had something truly special. Thus, my expectations were high for Fall of Cybertron. While it is a good game, the wholesale removal of multiplayer options in the campaign causes it to fall short from a co-op perspective.