This Week in Co-Op, Tally and Nick take you on an epic journey into the Torchlight 2 beta and their live streaming of the event from last week.  

It’s been a tough few weeks for me. After losing my job last week, I was having trouble focusing on what I should be doing next with my career. Obviously it’s all about finding my next job, but times are tight and I've been struggling to have things "work out". Luckily, Co-Optimus has been keeping me busy with work while I job hunt. Needless to say, I’ve been doing a bunch of gaming, which has also lead me to falling in love with a series that I had previously chosen to ignore.

I know I'm a little late to the Splinter Cell: Conviction party, but for some reason I never tried the game until this year. After reviewing the Windows Phone version for my other job, I decided to give the Xbox 360 game a chance. I enjoyed the stripped-down version, and its big brother even has both split-screen and online co-op for 2 players. How could I go wrong?

I was skeptikcal Bioware announced that Mass Effect 3 was going to have a co-op mode. As information trickled out to the masses, I drew conclusions that it was going to be a tacked-on horde mode rip-off that was added to the game in order to fill a checkbox requirement. I was being selfish, I didn’t want anything to sour my experience thus far in my wonderful space opera that I have been journeying through for the past five years. Having the Galactic Readiness level correlate to your multiplayer progress and allowing it to alter your single player ending was an ingenious way to force me to dip into the multiplayer even before I had finished the game. Well played Bioware, well played.

That's me, P. Walter Tugnut. Well, my version of Mr. Tugnut. I'm just cruising around my RV with my golden jet pack, sad and alone. My pink hair pick brings little joy to my supafly afro of gloom. My toned calves look magnificent in my fishnet stockings, but there's no one around to compliment them. I do have a giant mini-gun to keep me company, but alas, I've grown weary of her limited supply of ammo. You see, all my friends have gone to bed. I'm a West Coast gamer with an East Coast friends list. 

For the past several weeks, I’ve been dabbling in Dota 2. It’s one of those RTS/action games where you take control of a hero unit and defend your base from the opposing team. Though the focus of these games is usually competitive, Dota 2 supports a pretty good co-op mode (probably the best I’ve seen for the genre). Any number of players can form up on a team, fill up the remaining slots with bots, and go up against an all-bot team in good, old-fashioned comp-stomp. The bots are available in five different difficulty levels, so it’s easy to tweak the experience based on whether the players are new to the game or experienced. Of late, I’ve found the co-op mode a great way to blow off some steam.

For the past month or so, I've been in a bit of a gaming funk. My loyal ten-year old co-op partner and I have pretty much wrapped up all the games in our collection. The War in the North was ended successfully, and we managed to survive Raam's Shadow, leaving very little in the backlog. So, we scrolled through the long list of Xbox Live Arcade games to see what struck our fancy for our gaming time this week. There are literally dozens of games there that are perfect for short bursts of co-op gameplay before dinner.

It's been a hectic week for gaming. Truthfully, the last six weeks have been filled with mayhem.  My second child, Player Four, began the big game of life back in January.  Since then, finding time to play more frivolous games has become a daily struggle for us.  "Struggle" being a relative term.  It's not like we're freedom fighters.  We're just trying to get our game on without getting baby poo on our controllers.  Is that too much to ask?  According to Player Three, it is.  

In my recent Syndicate review I mentioned a great scenario in which three of us managed to take on a particularly tough level and come out victorious.  The actual scenario turned out to be one of the final levels of the co-op campaign.  The most amazing thing about our victory was that my two partners, Mike and Andrew, were only level 1 or 2 characters with minimal upgrades as they had just gotten the game.  While my level 14 or 15 was nothing to scoff it, it still showcases how balanced Syndicate's co-op can be even with an unbalanced team.

Writing for Co-Optimus has provided some unique co-op gaming opportunities for me. I now routinely play games that I would have waited for sales on or simply never picked up at all. A good example is Renegade Ops, an Xbox Live Arcade game that hadn’t been on my radar until it was chosen for our October Xbox Live Co-Op Night.

Playing games for work purposes can be a different experience than playing them for fun. This week I recount an experience I had when helping out a professional FAQ writer.

Locke and I decided to play some Moon Diver for our This Week in Co-Op session together. We’d both picked it up on a sale a couple weeks ago, intrigued by its artstyle and over-the-top shenanigans.

In the midst of the Great Gaming Avalanche of 2011, two of Co-Optimus’s intrepid staff members took some time out of their ridiculously busy schedules to blast through Gears of War 3’s Beast Mode.  It was a dirty job, but somebody had to do it!

This Week in Co-Op makes its return as Nick and Jason take to the island of Banoi only to discover it's become over run with the undead.  Like any good hollywood movie, what follows is an account of their epic adventure through Dead Island.

Okay, so maybe Justin Korthof isn’t really a robot, but he is the Community Manager for Robot Entertainment (currently promoting upcoming Orcs Must Die!), and I mean, c’mon, Gears - Robot? How could I not go there? All mechanical devices aside, Justin and I had a nice laid-back co-op session as we played the first few campaign missions of the first Gears of War. With Gears 3 fast approaching, he had the urge to go back and replay the first two games. As a father and the community manager of a game very close to launch, he hasn’t had much gaming time, so our TWIC All-Stars appointment fit the bill very neatly.