Co-Optimus

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare your wallets for monetary departure. Keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times and commence the downloading. Amazon is holding a "Digital Games Mayhem" sale offering deep discounts on downloadable PC games both new and old. Want that new Star Trek game after catching the movie this weekend?  It's only $25. How about Saints Row The Third with all the DLC for $12.50.

Dead on Arrival 2, the mobile zombie shooting arcade game currently under development by N3V Games, is ready for you. Well, its beta is ready for you, anyway. The team recently opened sign-ups for the Android beta phase of the game, which will commence June 1st. You'll need a decent Android device, of course, and N3V also warns that potential testers should have an iron stomach and a moral code that allows you to shoot zombified friends in the head. Check and check!

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.  Unless that rose was called Flatulent Rebellion, the new subtitle for the 4 player Hack 'n' Slash 'n' Fart game Orc Attack.  The going hasn't been easy for Orc Attack, but developers Casual Brothers are still planning to release the game on PC and other platforms.  To celebrate the new name, The Casual Brothers Grim have released a gas-centric trailer.  

Welcome to another edition of Beyond Co-Op, the weekly news round-up where we look at the gaming news around the industry that may or may not necessarily relate to cooperative gaming. It was a fairly quiet week as many gear up for the next Xbox announcement this coming week and E3 a few weeks away - still there's a few tidbits worth mentioning.

With the recent XBLA release of Monaco it seems a bunch of the staff have chosen to dive back into some co-op heisting. The Neverwinter beta also seems to be quite popular while the rest of us continue to trudge through site development. Soon folks you'll get a preview of that...soon.

We've got another exciting giveaway today thanks to the hard working people over at ROCCAT, makers of quality PC accessories. Up for grabs today are three items - The ROCCAT Kone XTD Gaming Mouse,  The ROCCAT Isku Gaming Keyboard, and the ROCCAT Sense Series Gaming Mousepad.

Mark this date in your diary, May 28th.  It's your Nan's birthday?  Who cares, this is also the date that new DLC is coming to everyone's favorite flaky city building game SimCity.  Mayors can now design and build an amusement park in their city that will increase tourism and create jobs.

Good news for defenders of Sanctuary. To help celebrate the one year anniversary of Diablo 3, Blizzard is offering an in-game buff to players. If you log on to play Diablo 3 between May 15 and May 21, you will receive a 25 percent buff to both magic find and experience gain stats. The developer states; "The buff is only available while logged in to the game, but it will apply to all characters as well as stack with other similar bonuses -- the EXP bonus will stack multiplicatively and the Magic Find bonus will stack above the 300% cap."

Achievement hunters out there might have been running into some trouble collecting a single one for BattleBlock Theater. The developers over at The Behemoth have listened to their dedicated fanbase and finally fixed the annoying glitch. Players may now unlock it today!

Another hero has joined the ranks of the Guardians of Middle Earth roster. Released this week, the latest champion hails from the armies of Gorgoroth. It is the Mouth of Sauron, and he is available now for both the Playstation Newtork and the Xbox Live Arcade.

Sanctum 2 is out! The sequel to the 2011 tower defense/first person shooter hybrid has finally hit, and developer Coffee Stain Studios is celebrating with a nice little launch trailer. The video manages to capture the game's intense action quite well, showing off a lot of gameplay footage complete with guns, explosions, towers doing their shooty things, and enemies bursting into brightly colored goo. Delicious.

We are but a few short days away from the unveiling of the next Xbox and the rumors are running quite rampant. One thing we do know for certain is that XNA, Microsoft's packaged game development tools, will no longer be supported, though nothing has been stated yet what that means for the XBLIG program. This week in Indie-Ana Co-op, we look at an indie game that shows the value in having a program like this on a console: Rise of the Ravager.