Blizzard have released the first batch of official mods for StarCraft II and among them is a co-op based one for two players called Left 2 Die.

Yuji Naka is one of the most famous members of the original Sonic Team for Sega, famous for creating such titles as the original Sonic the Hedgehog and Phantasy Star Online.  Now with his own studio called Prope, information has been trickling out about a new title for the Wii and Nintendo 3DS.  It's called Rodea the Sky Soldier and looks to be a an action oriented flying game in the realm of NiGHTS.

Brought to you in stunning HD, but forever alone

It's not often we cover games that have only been released in Japan, but in this case, we'll make an exception. The Onechanbara series made it to American shores in 2009, with releases for Xbox 360 and, oddly enough, Wii.  The formula for Onechanbara seems to be tough girls skimpy outfits zombies cool moves co-op - your brain.  Our review of the 360 release didn't pull any punches: it wasn't very good.  Still, there must be a market for cowgirls in bikinis wielding swords to decapitate the undead, and so D3 published Onechanbara Special for PSP.

We just received a fresh batch of screenshots showing off the impressive and co-op friendly Battlefield 3.  Most of the screens seem to be as part of the prevsiously released video series, but a few do show some new environments.

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

Is there an echo in here? Oh, that's the lack of Co-Optimus Community Voice April Blogs for the first week. The topic is craving to be explored with the possibilities of discovering a perfect length for games. The topic this month is CCV: tl;dr, giving you the opportunity to take an in-depth look at games we feel are "Too long; didn’t resolve," or "Too little; didn’t rejoice."

This week some of the formidable enemies of F.E.A.R.3 have been revealed in a frightfully detailed manner. The military forces have been revealed, detailing the men of the Armacham Army.

It seems several staff members are feeling a bit "meh" at the moment.  Maybe it's the fact that summer is tantalizingly close but still weeks away.  Maybe it's the fact that we want to be playing all the upcoming fall releases RIGHT NOW.  Or, maybe it's just too much too plan it all out.  Sometimes, rolling with it and playing whatever you want to on impulse is ok! 

Good news and bad news, potential dungeon siegers. First, the good news. Gamers who pre-order Dungeon Siege 3 through Steam will receive free digital copies of Dungeon Siege 1 and Dungeon Siege 2. Awesome.  All PC versions of DS3 will also "include a host of Steamworks features, including auto-updating, Steam Achievements, Steam Cloud support, downloadable content and more." Hooray!

Comedy Central's Ugly Americans is getting a video game treatment.  The animated series focuses on a social worker for the Department of Integration named Mark Lilly.  Set in New York City, the series focuses on Mark's interactions with NYC citizens, most of whom are some form of monster.  Mark narrates the episodes, which use thinly veiled metaphors and allegory to get the point across, something akin to Zach Braff's summation at the end of an episode of Scrubs.  I've actually seen a few shows and it doesn't totally suck.  It doesn't blow my skirt up, either, but I stopped wearing skirts after college.

The next downloadable map pack for Call of Duty: Black Ops - Escalation - has been outed by Australian games retailer GAME. In true Treyarch fashion, a new Zombies map will be included. Named "Call of the Dead", the co-op survival board joins four competitive maps (that should be playable in the pseudo-cooperative mode Combat Training as well), respectively named Zoo, Hotel, Convoy, and Stockpile.