Before you read: don't judge me by the above graphic, which is intended to be slightly humorous. While I'm not a fan of censorship in general, I can admit that as a new parent, it's relieving to know that game companies are taking the inevitable younger audiences into consideration when developing video games and platforms.

GamePolitics provides a link to Ars Technica, which has reported that Microsoft has just been awarded a patent for real-time audio censoring. Theoretically, this can be applied to game audio, video and music playback, and even voice chat.

Hit the "Read More" link for the rest of this intriguing announcement.

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Quite a bit of co-op news from the Microsoft Presser today.

Gears of War 2 will have a 5-player co-op multiplayer game mode called Horde.  Unfortunately, the main game will only see 2-player co-op.  Game is coming November 7th, 2008.

Resident Evil 5 will have 2-player co-op.  Game is coming March 13th, 2009.

Fable 2 will have pop-in/pop-out co-op.  You will see an orb on the screen representing your friends in their single-player experiences.  You walk up to the orb and can connect instantly to your friend in co-op.  Game is coming in October 2008.

More after the break...

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We are used to playing co-op on handheld gaming devices, thanks to Nintendo and Sony.  Ever since Microsoft jumped into the console market with the original Xbox, it has been rumored that they would follow suit with a portable gaming device of their own, as well.  While this hasn't been the case so far, owners of Microsoft's portable media player, the Zune, may get to play some games after all.  A Zune was seen playing an XNA game at GDC recently.  Chris Satchell, XNA guru, had this to say:

One of the things we talked about was the network play, and we've had people doing prototypes internally of multiplayer shoot-'em-ups both in versus and co-op.

Most gamers will not head out to buy a Zune for a few co-op shoot em ups; however, the Zune is a fairly full featured device already, and adding a few games to the mix would certainly help it stand up to Goliath.  Current Zune owners and those on the fence might keep this news in mind.