It’s always a huge deal when a StarCraft expansion is close to release, just like when the original Starcraft got a major facelift when it upgraded to the Brood War expansion. Now, StarCraft 2 will be unleasing the1st of two expansions: Heart of the Swarm with new units to command.

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.

Twelve years ago a little game called StarCraft was released on the PC.  A sequel in some regards to another franchise named WarCraft, StarCraft forever changed the face of real time strategy gaming.  Now over a decade later the sequel has finally arrived.  

Well, well, well...look what we have here.   A release date, from Blizzard!  There are those that said this day would never come, but here it is.    Starcraft II: Wings of LIberty is set for an early summer release on July 27th.  Launching with the game is a completely revamped version of Blizzard's Battle.net service which includes friends lists, match making, achievements, cloud storage and more.

Blizzard has announced the pricing of the regular edition and a brand new Collector's Edition of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty.  The regular version of the game will set you back $59.99 when it launches later this year while for the truly die hard fan weighing the collector's edition will set you back $99.99.  What's in that shiny box?

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

The StarCraft 2 closed beta launched today, and with it thousands...nay...millions of fans continuously hit F5 on their inbox checking for an invite.  Sadly the beta is pretty limited at this time, so there were lots of disappointed folks, but we managed to sneak a peak at the game and found some interesting things.  

You may not know Greg Canessa, but Xbox 360 owners are probably using something he created everyday.  Canessa has had his hand in creating many things for Microsoft like achievements, match making and Xbox Live Arcade before moving onto Pop Cap Games for a brief stay.  Now with Blizzard, Canessa is the projector director for the upcoming Battle.net update which will see plenty of enhanced features for StarCraft 2 and eventually Diablo 3.

The stories for this week: