Move over Captain Olimar, there is a new crew in town in the form of Alph, Captain Charlie and Brittany.  Each of them appears in the upcoming Pikmin 3 and believes they can do the best job in herding, collecting food and sending Pikmin to an untimely and gruesome end.  Check out the new trailer to see the threesome in action.

While our focus here at Co-Optimus has been and always will be cooperative video games, from time to time, we cover co-op tabletop game news as well. A hard to find, out of print co-op board game, Wok Star, is in the final hours of a successful campaign on Kickstarter. The initial print run in 2010 sold out quickly, and for the second print, publisher Game Salute took the crowd funding route to get the game into more gamers' hands.

With the multitude of games getting released these days, both from major development studios and independent ones, it's easy for a great game to go under the radar. Such was almost the case for Risk of Rain, an action/adventure platformer with rogue-like elements that supports 4 player local co-op on PC. Fortunately, Matthew Griffin of Yeti Trunk, the developers behind Wanderlust: Rebirth, shot us an email to not only bring the game to our attention, but also let us in on a bit of exciting co-op news. Specifically, that he's working with the game's developers to add online co-op to the game.

Welcome to another edition of Beyond Co-Op, the weekly news round-up where we look at the gaming news around the industry that may or may not necessarily relate to cooperative gaming. It was a fairly quiet week as many gear up for the next Xbox announcement this coming week and E3 a few weeks away - still there's a few tidbits worth mentioning.

Holy crap, we launched a new website! Have you seen it? We're pretty proud of it. You should take the tour. While some of us continue to tweak what we've birthed, we'll also be enjoying some of the gaming backlog we've acquired and avoiding the scorching temperatures of summer. Here's what the Co-Optimus staff is playing this weekend.

You would think that making a game free would be enough to get people to continue playing it, but that's not the case.  Happy Wars has continued to be successful because it keeps providing new content and updates.  If these don't tickle your fancy, how about a weekend of Double XP?  

Who said you couldn't get great video game freebies with your snacks? You may have recalled how Activision made a special set of Skylander figurines available through a promotion with Frito-Lay products. In much the same way, Activision has once again paired with Frito-Lay in order to offer a few limited edition sidekicks for Skylanders Giants.

I was about to post the new trailer announcing the console release of Farming Simulator 2013. I was hoping this was a joke, and the game would actually let us hunt colossal ninja dragons in enormous zombie-powered steampunk mechs or something like that. It turns out it's a game that simulates farming in 2013. Go figure.

Now that things are settled down a bit, we wanted to show you some of the new features of Co-Optimus and how the site can better serve your needs for finding co-op games, co-op game news,  more content and features. The entire site was rebuilt from the ground up to support PC, tablet, and mobile platforms with the same functionality available on across each device. 

Good news for fans of open-world shooters. Red 5 Studios has announced that there free-to-play open world shooter Firefall has entered stage one of open beta testing. Blending the best parts of skill-based combat and sci-fi action, the developers encourage everyone to try their game and contribute feedback in order to make the game even better. You can follow this link to join the open beta for free.

Payday 2 is a little more than a month away, and quite frankly I can't wait. July is a dog for co-op releases. The online cooperative heist game will allow four players to rob banks, knock off jewelry stores, wear snazzy masks, and more. 

Apparently some people on the internets have been spreading around their opinion that now that the Borderlands 2 Season Pass has released its fourth and final promised DLC, there won't be any more Borderlands 2 DLC. Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, however, has recently put a stop to these rumors.