The holiday season is just around the corner, and you know what that means: less dough for the latest co-op games!  It's especially bad for co-op gamer parents.  Check out our handy guide to managing the kids, your spouse, and all those great games while keeping the wallet fat this year!

Sometimes, when a game DOESN'T have co-op, it's news worthy.  That's certainly the case for the remake/reimagining of one of our favorite co-op classics, Golden Axe.  Released next month, Golden Axe: Beast Rider will offer only a single player campaign.  That's right, no co-op mode, or any multiplayer features are available at all.  To make things worse, you can't even choose among the original three heroes; instead, the player will take on the role of Tyris Flare, only.  (To their credit, the developers promise that the other two heroes from the original will be featured in the story).  Of course, Tyris is wearing her obviously marketable chain mail bikini, pushing the borders of appropriateness.  This is, I suppose, reminiscient of the first Golden Axe.  Screenshots and videos indicate that the game is meant to evoke feelings of nostalgia, including beast riding (duh), potion gnomes, and even Black Adder, the big baddie himself.  It's too bad they missed the most important aspect: playing through with a friend.  Check this quote from Sean Ratcliffe, VP of Marketing at Sega:

“Rightly or wrongly, we don’t have co-op multiplayer in the game,” he offered, a statement that was met with a short, yet uncomfortable pause. “I think as much as anything it’s taking inspiration from the original series but in terms of that multiplayer co-op the developer decided that they didn’t want to take the game in that direction.”

“If Golden Axe: Beast Rider is successful,” he added, “we can then come back with something else that maybe will have the co-op mode that everyone is wishing this game has.”

I have news for Mr. Ratcliffe.  There are lots of excellent single player combat focused games, like God of War, Ninja Gaiden, etc.  If you want Golden Axe: Beast Rider to stand out from the crowd, give players what these other titles don't: the same co-op play that made the original a classic.  What say you, Co-Optimus readers?  Would you pick this title up if it featured co-op?

Welcome to our second part of our introduction to our Co-Op Couples series we are beginning here on Co-Optimus.com.  In the first part we looked at breaking down traditional barriers and overcoming any personal shortcomings that may happen.  Next we look at a few or our reader's examples of how they got their significant other involved in their gaming habits.  Above and beyond that, we look at how they began to play co-op games together.

E3 kicks off tomorrow at 10:30 AM Pacific Time with Microsoft Press conference.  While a price cut is imminent for Microsoft, we also hope we'll hear a bit about some new and interesting titles that feature co-op play.  In fact, one thing I personally hope for throughout the whole show is to see some new franchises, not just sequels, that have a great focus on co-op. 

So here are some of our first ever co-op predictions for E3 2008.

1. Gears of War 2 will have 4 player co-op.
2. Little Big Planet's co-op will allow players to craft stories to play together.
3. A small game developer will come up with a completely unique way to implement co-op in a game.
4. Prototype will have co-op returned to the game.

What are some of your predictions for the show?  Co-Op or otherwise.

The fine folks over at 1UP are taking a look at the Co-Op Bill of Rights again; this time interviewing the author of it, Andre Vrignaud. 

1UP discusses just how well received this document was within the gaming community, as well as at Andre's own Microsoft.  Of course everyone wants to know the feasibility of making something like this stick.  "It's up to the game developers to innovate on the platform as they see fit," says Vrignaud, "If we can help with ideas... great!"

Another interesting topic brought up is something of a new phenomina, something that I say is nice to have.  We are seeing some high profile games claiming to have 4 and 8 person co-op (like Resistance 2), but is more always better?  Probably not says Vrignaud, as you add more people communication begins to break down with people talking over each other.  "If the communication aspect is breaking down, maybe they need to rethink whether or not it's really a co-op experience."

It's good to see our Bill of Rights as co-op gamers getting such attention from high profile sites like 1UP.com.  This year has been an amazing year so far for fans of co-op with more and more games including it standard - lets just hope they begin to do it properly instead of adding it for a bullet point on the back of their box.

If you've been following things around the site, you know now for the past 2 weeks or so we've been gathering data on exactly what gamers are looking for in their co-op experience.   Andre over at Ozymandias.com as compiled data from multiple sources and come up with the official Co-Op Gamer's Bill of Rights: 2008 Edition.  A term coined by Tycho of Penny Arcade.  

If you didn't know, Andre works for Microsoft's product development team.  You could say that he has..."an in".  And that's a good thing because he was kind enough to dig up some interesting stats about cooperative gameplay on Xbox Live.

As of October 2007, the following stats were true for co-op on Xbox Live.

• 64% of Halo 3 players had played Halo 3 co-op at least once
• 47% of Gears of War players had received the "Dom-Curious" co-op achievement
• 34% of Crackdown players had played co-op and killed at least one boss

That first number really has to stand out at you - 64% played co-op.  Last time I checked around October there were at least 3 million copies of the game floating around.  So you do the math.

So with all that, the Bill of Rights is written.  It's broken up into two sections.  The first section is everyone's expected baseline experience.  Something EVERY co-op game should have.  The second section is the things that are nice to have, but not absolutely necessary (or may be difficult to implement).

Read More...

Oh how happy it makes me to see the love of co-op spreading through the interwebs.  In sort of a follow up to what we mentioned earlier, Andre over at Ozymandias.com put up a bit of a response to Tycho's call for a Bill of Rights for Co-Op games.   This is excellent news folks!  Why?  If you don't know, Andre works for Microsoft's Xbox group in product development role.  And while he is careful to point out the content that is posted on his site is not necessarily the ideals of Microsoft, it's no doubt they carry significant weight.

In particular I was particularly stuck by the comment about defining what a gamer considers bedrock functionality for co-op gaming. This sort of thinking is very similar to some of the thinking we do with the industry around platform features, and it got my co-worker Krotus and I chatting about what features might be considered as being the basic "bar" for a co-op title. The industry has come a long way in just a few years, and we wanted to see what we might come up with that we'd like to see in future titles. A little bit of whiteboarding later we came up the list below... and would love your thoughts on it!

They came up with a pretty decent list of required features all co-op games should have.  And they came up with a list of a list of features they'd like to see but may be a bit harder to implement.   So while requirements would be LAN, Splitscreen and Online Co-Op, nice to have would be co-op specific puzzles and gameplay elements.   Be sure to check out the full post, and be sure to leave some feedback in our What do YOU want in a Co-Op game thread.  Because what better site to host the co-op Bill of Rights than Co-Optimus.com?

Co-Optimus has only been around for 6 weeks now, but that doesn't mean the site isn't getting noticed around the internet.

We've only begun to build a strong community of gamers, co-op fans, and readers who want to know the latest news about their favorite form of gaming.  But now the question is...what makes co-op gaming so much fun?  Is it the teamwork?  Perhaps those "had to be there" moments? 

What we really want to know is -

What features do you look for in a co-op game?

Whether it's item trading, player communication, co-op specific level design, or drop in/drop out ability - let us know!  Be sure to leave a comment...you never know who may be looking at it!

We've seen more and more games integrate co-op. In fact, games like Army of Two and Conflict: Denied Ops have been built from the ground up to support a cooperative experience. I found this great little article over at Running the IT Race in which the author asks the question, Co-Op Games, Where are They?. The article talks specifically about Bioshock and System Shock 2. The latter game by the same developer as Bioshock had a Co-Op multiplayer patch added on to it after release. It was immensely popular. Yet when the sequel came out, co-op was mysteriously missing.

The game was a literary masterpiece with an incredibly original story. So it was with great surprise to find out that Bioshock, the spiritual successor to the System Shock universe was not going to include any form of multiplayer CO-OP component. You would think that the developers would have included it based on the critical success of System Shock 2. But alas they didn’t and we were forced to drudge through Rapture in a solo capacity. I read recently that Bioshock had just won 11 awards for various things, interesting but did it really deserve them, there’s practically zero re-playability in the game. System Shock 2 on the other hand has mountains of replayability. If they had made System Shock 3 or even re-made System Shock 2 I’m sure it would have been even more acclaimed.

There's another article over at popular blog Infendo in which a reader asks the same question.

what the hell happened to classic, simultaneous co-op adventure and platforming games? it’s not that i don’t have a problem with playing by myself, but it just seems like whenever i have a friend or a relative that i actually get along with comes over, i’m left dry of good 2 player games for us to play. usually i have to whip out Smash bros or some other racing/fighting/shooting game whenever they do.

This is one of the reasons why we exist at Co-Optimus. We need to make developers aware that we want cooperative gameplay as a standard in games. Just like online deathmatch and multiplayer became a standard years ago, cooperative play needs to be next!

I still remember my first cooperative gaming experience in Doom on the PC.  The day I brought home my 14.4 modem so a buddy and I could experience all the carnage the game has to offer online.  Side by side fighting the endless horde from hell.  Anyone who has ever played a game cooperatively knows the experience is like no other. 

For quite some time gamers cried out to developers to have a co-op mode in their games.  For what seemed like years, games that allowed you to have the same experience with a buddy were few and far between.  But it seems developers have finally heard our cries as more and more titles are including a co-op mode out of the box.  There are even games being designed from the ground up as a co-op experience. 

So with that, we've launched Co-Optimus.com.  Everything game you see on this site has a co-op mode in it.  We'll tell you how many friends you can play with, if you can play online, splitscreen, and more.  Anything you need to know about that game that pertains to cooperative gameplay...we'll tell you.

Looking for the perfect co-op experience?  Give our Advanced search a try.  Simply click the little button in the top right:

Finally to celebrate our launch we are giving away a few games this week.  How do you enter?  Simply sign up for an account on our forums and I'll randomly pick the winners at the end of the week.  What are we giving away?

1 Copy of Burnout Paradise for the Xbox 360.
1 Code for Omega 5 for the Xbox Live Arcade.
1 Code for Tron for the Xbox Live Arcade.

So browse the site, let us know what you think.