The team regretted visiting the outdoor discotheque once Horace had been hit by lightening

The past few years have brought video gamers an explosion of co-op.  This trend is echoed in the board game world, with many solid cooperative games being released, several of which we've covered here at Co-Optimus.  Later this year, one of the premiere co-op franchises is coming to a tabletop near you.  Gears of War The Board Game allows one to four players to team up against the Locust horde.  From what we can tell, it looks very similar to the system used in Castle Ravenloft, with a modular board, enemy AI cards, and lots of intricate miniatures.  The game is being produced by Fantasy Flight Games, a company that is well regarded in board game circles.  MSRP is a hair under $80, and games last between 1 and 3 hours.  It's nice to know that we have two great games in the Gears franchise to look forward to this year!

Gatling Gears is what you get when you mix one part old-timey war game, a quarter cup co-op, a foundation of twin stick shooter, and some interesting design choices on the Xbox LIVE Arcade and Playstation Network. How well do these ingredients work together? Well, that’s what we set out to discover.

We have two new trailers for Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D.  These vids can be seen back to back in the following magical movie window.  They're packed full of gameplay footage, and as an added bonus, they're in Japanese!  Looks like there will be plenty of first person aiming, melee attacks, and body spraying (:52 mark).

The Gears of War 3 multiplayer beta came to an end on Sunday.  The sudden stoppage of shotgun pwnage left Gears fans with a long summer wait for the early autumn retail release.  I, myself, was disenchanted with the beta, (I'm extraordinarily bad at Gears multiplayer, like, patheti-sad) but many, many gamers were not.  1.29 million players joined the beta.  Epic and Microsoft also announced that there have been over 1 million pre-orders for Gears of War 3, "making it the fastest pre-ordered Xbox exclusive title to reach this milestone in the history of the platform."  This may have to do with the fact that pre-ordering Gears of War 3 was one of the few ways to access the multiplayer beta.  Xbox LIVE's Major Nelson has all the stats you could ask for:

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.  As soon as you hear the familiar scream of the headless kamikaze enemies from the Serious Sam universe you know what comes next - kaboom.  This staple enemy has been a thorn in Sam's side throughout the series and now we have our first glimpse at its third iteration in Serious Sam 3: BFE.

Kotaku has let the cat out of the bag on Modern Warfare 3 - and in this case - the cat is wielding an M16A4 with red dot attachment...and it's shooting puppies.  What Kotaku has on their hands, and what they decided to leak and print for the world, is the rumored entire plot, characters, maps, weapons, and locations of Modern Warfare 3.  Most likely these details were leaked by former Infinity Ward employees that have since moved on - making the details and concept art well over a year old.  So as accurate as some of it is, according to Infinity Ward Communications Directory Robert Bowling - "some still accurate, some not. To avoid spoiling the experience, I'd wait for the real reveal."

Remember when zombies were cool?  I'm not talking early-to-mid 2000 cool, like when The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z were fun little literary distractions.  Nor when games like Dead Rising and movies like the Dawn of the Dead remake were breathing life back into the soon to be over-exploited genre.  I talking Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead on VHS, and (at the time) hard to find copies of The Evil Dead 1 and 2, plus horrible foreign films with the word "Zombie" misspelled.  Remember when zombies were cool, because no one else thought they were?  No?  Me neither.  

A while ago I posted an article about the Dark Souls Collector's Edition--What's that? That was yesterday? Are you sure? I thought I put that up months ago...having a kid is hard... Anyway, in that article I listed Dark Souls as having 2 player online co-op. A longtime member of Co-Optimus, Psyclops, pointed out that one could clearly see 3 player co-op in the trailers. I immediately went looking for this alleged co-op footage, and found this gem, posted by our brilliant resident foreigner, Sam. It features a teeny-tiny glimpse of what might be 3 player co-op. I blinked while watching it, so there's no way to be sure. Could Psyclops be wrong?

A couple of weeks ago we gave you guys the heads-up that SEGA is doing an HD remake of action-RPG Guardian Heroes for Xbox Live Arcade, a game that was originally exclusive to the Sega Saturn. Now we have some additional details about what will set the remake apart, besides the vague term "enhanced graphics" (and yes, you can play with the original graphics enabled if you wish via "Saturn Mode"). SEGA has even provided some side-by-side comparison shots.

That's what I'm talking about!  Barry Burton is back, baby!  The magnum-wielding STARS agent will be playable in Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D.  If you're not familiar with Barry's awesomeness, then either you haven't played the first Resident Evil, or you haven't stumbled upon a montage of "master of unlocking" and "Jill sandwich" jokes during one of your trips through the internet.  Barry has some of the greatest bad lines in video game voice acting history. Go ahead and take a look here if you don't believe me.  I'll wait.  

Publisher Aksys Games has just released the Cave developed SHMUP called Deathsmiles on Xbox Live.  The full game download will set you back $30 and features two player online and local co-op play.