Blizzard made Starcraft II free-to-play last week, and so we decided we'd hop in real quick to check out what (exactly) you can do cooperatively. Turns out, it's a fair amount.

During last week's Blizzcon, the California-based developer announced that Starcraft II, the follow-up to one of the most popular RTS games of all time, would be going free-to-play... within a limited capacity.

Being able to access and play a free version of Starcraft II is quite the gift from Blizzard to give, but what if you wanted to share your gaming experiences with a friend as well. Entering today is a thing called, “Spawning”; a brand new feature that essentially brings free co-op options to those who don’t own the full game themselves.

The next chapter in the Starcraft 2 sage has finally found its release date! Those that can wait patiently until March of next year will be quite pleased with what they can grab through pre-ordering.

It’s always a huge deal when a StarCraft expansion is close to release, just like when the original Starcraft got a major facelift when it upgraded to the Brood War expansion. Now, StarCraft 2 will be unleasing the1st of two expansions: Heart of the Swarm with new units to command.

Blizzard have released the first batch of official mods for StarCraft II and among them is a co-op based one for two players called Left 2 Die.

The World of StarCraft MMO mod for StarCraft 2 has been rename and retooled into Starcraft Universe.  The change comes on the heels of a wild week for the mod's creator in which he was given a cease and desist letter from Activisions Lawyers, offered a job by League of Legends developer Riot Games, and finally flown out to Blizzard HQ to present his case to the team.  The end result of this yielded a new mod that's slightly retooled, renamed, and not quite the MMO people originally hoped for.

Blizzard has some new game modes for StarCraft 2 available for beta-testing over at Battle.net.  These new modes draw inspiration from some unlikely sources.  Names like "Auir Chef", "StarJeweled", and "Left 2 Die" hint at what gamers can expect.  While none of these may be as noteworthy as the World of StarCraft Land of StarArt mod that appeared last week, two out of three support co-op play, and that ain't half bad.  Actually, that's two-thirds good!

On Tuesday, January 18th, we brought you video of a Starcraft 2 mod called "World of Starcraft".  The mod was created using the tools packaged with Starcraft  2, you know, those crazy mod tools provided by the developers and publishers themselves.  Apparently, this video was a little too awesome for Activision Blizzard Inc. to handle, so they killed it.  It's dead now.  It has ceased to be.  You can't find it, anywhere.  The video has been pulled from YouTube with the old "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Activision Games Inc."  So use the mod tools, just don't make anything Blizzard would want to make money off of.

What happens when you put together two things that are awesome?  Apparently, you get awesome squared; need proof?  Just check out Starcraft 2 mod called World of Starcraft.  It combines two things we love (namely, World of Warcraft and Starcraft 2) into something that can only be described as "full of win".  Though the mod is only in a pre-alpha state at the moment, it looks quite highly polished already.  So far, the focus is on Terran infantry units as player characters, but can Zerglings or Zealots be too far behind?  The real question here is: why didn't Blizzard do this themselves, five years ago?

Blizzard has often been known as having some extensive and game-changing patches. Anyone who's played through different patches of Diablo 2 knows that a Blizzard patch can make it feel like a completely different game (mostly due to severe balance changes). Starcraft 2 got patched last week to version 1.2 and while there are a few balance changes for all of the races, patch 1.2 is mostly bug fixes and UI and Editor improvements:

It was over two months ago that we told you about the free name change feature coming to StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty.  That is, the one time free name change that Blizzard was going to offer for those of you like me, that accidently chose the wrong name for your Battle.Net account.  That feature is now live, to activate it you'll need to log into your Battle.Net account via the website and click the link that says FREE Character Name Change.