With the holidays upon us, it's time to buy Xbox 360 hardware and software for yourself, I mean, your loved ones. We've selected some choice gifts for both naughty and nice gamers.

While Gears of War 3 wrapped up the story of Marcus, Dom and crew quite nicely - rumors are already circulating about more games in the series.  The Official Xbox Magazine has the pulse on what seems to be a likely scenario - a new trilogy of Gears of War games set before the current in true Star Wars fashion.  

  Call of Duty Elite has had a bit of a rough start.  The online service exclusive to the Call of Duty franchise was not ready for the absolute influx of people using it, by some estimates, well over 1 million paying subscribers - that's not even counting the free users.  Sadly all of this meant slow to no connections, wai...

Today, we continue our look back at two video game consoles released one decade ago. Last week, we covered Microsoft's first console, the Xbox, and its most notable innovation to co-op, online play through Xbox Live. But the Xbox wasn't the only console to arrive in stores in time for the holiday shopping season in 2001. NIntendo's GameCube hit the shelves on November 18 of that year, and brought some excellent cooperative experiences to gamers that were unavailable on any other system.

If you're a PC gamer (and especially if you're an FPS PC gamer), then you're likely familiar with what I like to call Short-End-Of-The-Stick-Console-Portitis. Okay, so I just made that up now, but the heart of the matter is true. With a huge amount of blockbuster titles being developed on the consoles, there's many a time that the PC port versions are lackluster, or downright close to broken. Sometimes these ports are months or years later. Sometimes they just don't come to PC at all.

Modern Warfare 3 is a game with many different modes, but we do co-op here so we have taken a closer look at the Spec Ops and Survival game modes.  Both modes have you and a partner join forces to take on enemies that come in many different forms. Spec Ops has 16 very different missions and Survival is Modern Warfare's take on the ever popular 'Horde Mode' and both will have you coming back for more. 

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

Amazon is the place to go for the most co-op game deals this Black Friday.  Everything from Battlefield 3 to the Kinect is on sale for some pretty ridiculous prices.  Sadly it looks like the awesome PS3 bundle sold out rather quickly.  

Amazon is matching Walmart's bundle and price this Black Friday on the PlayStation 3 with some really solid co-op games.  You'll get a 160GB PS3, a controller and the co-op games Ratchet and Clank: All 4 One and Little Big Planet 2 for just $199.99.  Best of all, instead of trying to brave Walmart on the busiest shopping day of the year, you can simply click your mouse and order.

Living in Europe I have never had the pleasure of visiting Canada, but I imagine a huge country full of impressive vistas and vast Mounties.  What I wouldn't expect is another Zombie invasion (they usually stick to the major cities of America).  However, this is exactly the experience Konami supplied with Zombie Apocalypse: All Zombie Must Die and the game is being expanded with some new DLC.  How aboot that!

In our co-op review of F1 2011, we gave it a disappointing 1 out of 5 for co-op, despite the fact that we judged it a cool 4 out of 5 for the overall score. This was simply due to the fact that at the time of review, the co-op was broken, broken, broken. Issues like players being dropped in their position at the end of a race are simply game-breaking. The good news, though, is that the patch that's directed to fixing all of our complaints about the co-op is now live! Not only will co-op issues be addressed, but performance, AI, and set-up issues are being fixed as well. You can check out the patch notes that we previously posted here. Some of you may also be interested to know that the online leaderboards for time attack and time trial modes will be reset due to a set-up bug fix. The reset is slotted for some time next week.

How's it going, Banoi veterans?  Dead Island's long awaited Bloodbath Arena DLC recently infected digital marketplaces, and today we've got our gameplay impressions for you.  The Bloodbath Arena offers new challenges for up to four co-op players in four arenas of varying difficulties.  It's a pretty standard survival mode, with some Dead Island twists.