Grab your hotdog suit, strap on your rocket launcher and hop on your motorcycle in Saint's Row 2 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3.  (PC coming November 10th)

Well, it looks like the lack of a standard hard drive has finally bit Microsoft in the proverbial behind.  The upcoming New Xbox Experience Dashboard update; which will feature an 8 player party system amongst other great features like play from hard drive, avatars, Netflix streaming and more; will require at least 128MB of storage to run and/or install. 

The holiday season is a wonderful time. It's a season of giving, eating mass quantities of food, and gathering with family and friends. This creates the perfect environment for co-op gaming, something yours truly can attest to. This holiday season is shaping up to be a good one for co-op fans and thankfully, Shacknews has noticed and created a list of the "Best Co-op Games of the Holiday Season and Beyond."

The LittleBigPlanet beta has come and gone, and now we're all in the same boat: waiting impatiently until the game's release on October 21, an interminable eight days from today.  Perhaps a few tidbits of LBP news will tide you over in the meantime, while you daydream of Sackboys.

The competitive multiplayer beta may have just begun for Call of Duty: World at War, but that's not what interests us.  We want to know about the game's co-op mode, and thankfully we have some hands on impressions with Activision's latest.   Previews, Screens and Video are all yours, so read on!

Just because my gamerscore is over 55 thousand, that doesn't mean I'm an achievement whore.  That also doesn't mean I don't love hearing about a game's upcoming achievements. And it especially doesn't mean I don't like to hear when there are co-op specific achievements.  Got that?  I'll try again.  I like achievements, especially when they are co-op.  Damn, that was much easier.

Need proof that co-op gaming is on the rise?  How about the fact that pre-orders for Left 4 Dead, the 4 player co-op shooter from Valve Software, is selling about 60% higher in preorders than the insanely popular Orange Box did.  Impressions for the game have been nothing short of outstanding, ours included, so it's no surprise the pre-sale hype is strong with this one.

It's an expensive time of the year, for the co-op gamer.  Some premiere titles have just been or will shortly be released.  So, money can be tight, and any good deals are worth looking into.  One such good deal has been posted over at PS3News. 

No cheeky commentary here, folks, we'll just cut to the chase and give you this quote from IGN's interview with Diablo III Head Dude Rob Pardo:

Oh dear, Co-Optimus.com has gone all thug this morning.  First Soulja Boy and now 50 Cent?  Yes my find friend, all in the great name of co-op.  According to Kotaku, the co-op friendly 50 Cent: Blood in the Sand has been picked up by games publisher THQ.  There's no word on a release date or a status, in fact there hasn't even been an official announcement, but we'll keep our eyes close to the blinding desert on this one.

Sometimes in this wide world of web information, there's a video game related piece of news or video that simply too good to pass up and not share with you fine folks here at Co-Optimus.  Even though this video has nothing to do with cooperative gaming, perhaps in some twisted sense, it shows just why we all love to play co-op more than competitive.

The stories for this week: