Every year I loved to be surprised by games I had absolutely no interest in before E3.  My game for day one of E3 was Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure.  To call it a game though, is a bit of an understatement, in reality Skylanders is a new product line from Activision that melds the character  collection of Pokemon with an action adventure game and versus battle brawler all rolled into one.  Oh, did I mention there's real figures to collect that save your character data and transmit it between platforms like the Xbox 360, PC, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii?

Today, I attended my first honest to goodness E3 hands-on appointment.  The lucky winner was developer Certain Affinity, makers of Crimson Alliance, yet another hack and slash action RPG.  What separates Crimson Alliance from the glut of recently released dungeon crawlers?  How about fast-paced action, a streamlined inventory, and most importantly, co-op done right.  You can play Crimson Alliance with four players online, four players locally, or any combination you wish.  And best of all, your character save data stays with your Xbox Live Gamertag.

When we think of E3, we often think of game and hardware updates and reveals, but hey, you need accessories to go with said games and hardware. This week at E3, SteelSeries announced their partnership with Blizzard Entertainment in co-marketing a family of Diablo III peripherals. This line consists of a SteelSeries Diablo III Mouse, Headset, and two mousepads with artwork of the Barbarian or Witch Doctor. 

Today at E3 one of my highlight appointments was with Lexis Numerique for their survival horror game Amy. Amy features two main protagonist characters, but they interact with each other and are not independently playable characters. At any rate, I went on an in-depth tour of the world of Amy, and I'm going to explain it to you anyway.

As expected, Nintendo announced their long-rumored sequel to the Wii today.  The new console, dubbed the Wii U, will be released sometime next year.  The Wii U will output at 1080p in HD, which means you will no longer be embarassed at all those jaggies on your fancy big screen TV.  The Wii U will be backwards compatible with Wii games and controllers; backwards compatibility is something Nintendo always gets right.

News from E3 is coming fast and furious, with a lot of great games, platforms, and features for we gamers to which to look forward. Until those release dates roll around, though, it seemed like a perfect time to take a little look back at some great co-op Indie Games available now!

There are only a few things you need to know about Ruin, an upcoming game from Sony San Diego, for it to pique your interest...

We bring you this special bulletin...

Bohemia Interactive have released a teaser trailer for Arma 3, their next iteration in their tactical warfare series for the PC. It sort of blurs the line between live action video and in game footage.  We're actually quite confused at what we're looking at, especially if you let the trailer run passed the closing logo.  

I've already mused upon the violent nature of the latest batch of trailers coming out of E3 this year.  At least we have the Brothers in Arms franchise to bring us back to reality.  Gearbox's latest entry into the series, titled Brothers in Arms: Furious 4 is yet another World War 2 shooter.  Yes, it's been done before, but maybe a serious treatment of one of the darkest periods in mankind's history is what we need -something that shows the consequences of our violent actions.  We know it's a first person shooter that will support four player co-op, as well as a versus multiplayer mode.  Let's take a look at the debut trailer and see what Gearbox has in store for us...

Ubisoft's 2011 E3 conference was an interesting experience this year, as the 25 year aniversary of the company has appeared. As such the show was a lot of retro-style quirks and interesting throwbacks to their original games - at least one of which is co-op now.

EA's E3 2011 press conference was this afternoon following Microsoft out of the stables. They kept things mostly low-key for a press conference in LA, taking up a small stage in the Orpheum theater - rocking a loud sound-system and a large screen to show off their titles, and boy did they ever show off some beauties.