When the newest generation of consoles debuted at E3 two years ago, one of the biggest gripes players had about them was that previous titles were not supported. Sony eventually revealed PlayStation Now, a kind of rental/streaming service for older titles. Today, Microsoft went one step further and announced that the Xbox One will fully support 360 titles natively.

Once again, my main co-op partner in crime, Richie, and I decided to switch things up from our usual routine and give a completely different game a go for once (we seldom break away from GTA Online or Awesomenauts these days). Since we couldn't decide on what to play, we tried to come to find a game that would satisfy both our likings. After much deliberation, we landed on an old favorite: Perfect Dark HD, mainly because we had the game sitting in our backlog for quite some time. Though I still don't know what happened to my original N64 cartridge of Perfect Dark, we both had downloaded the XBLA version (developed by 4J Studios) for an incredibly low price.

Beginning today Xbox Live Gold members will be treated to a 50% off sale of select Xbox Live Arcade titles. The Deal of the Week includes nine games total, five of which have co-op. All five of these games have couch co-op, which comes in handy if you have actual physical friends and family.

Here's a nice little surprise if you own Perfect Dark HD on Xbox Live Arcade - a Crackdown 2 agent.  How do you get him?  All you need to do is play the final version of Crackdown 2 and upon firing up Perfect Dark HD the game will detect the save file and unlock "Agent 4."

I'm going to enjoy seeing the Twitter responses when this post gets auto-tweeted to the Co-Optimus followers. Most confusing headline ever? May be.

This last few months of gaming have been kind to retro co-op games, and I can think of a few warm-n-fuzzies I've felt recently. This weeks On The Download will aim to spark a mushy retromance with some of the recent vintage downloadables. We also want to hear what you'd like to see remade.

If there’s anything gamers are guilty of, it’s nostalgia blindness. We love to replay the things that we played when we were younger gamers, but just how well do some games hold up to the test of time? We played Perfect Dark HD on the Xbox Live arcade, and put the Nintendo 64 classic to the test.

There's a pair of co-op releases this week, both of which belong to long standing franchises.

Resident Evil 5 is the name of the game, and surviving the new DLC mode requires strategy. On The Download this week will be taking an in-depth, but spoiler-free look "Lost In Nightmares." We'll also explore new DLC and Arcade titles, as well as our recommended freebie of the week.

The Co-Optimus staff doesn't have an overtly reputation for getting too far ahead of ourselves, although on occasion we're known to get excited about something that may have been too good to be true. In this case, we found a video that suggested there would be 8-player co-op in the Perfect Dark Xbox Live Arcade port...it turns out that was the online multiplayer mode. Co-op is still online and offline, but limited to two players in each case.

Microsoft's X10 event is underway, and the first bit of co-op news is confirmed.  Perfect Dark HD will launch this coming March as part of a new promotion called the Xbox LIVE Arcade Block Party.

Hello fellow co-op gamers, Jenkins of the Madballs in...Babo: Invasion B-D-I faction (for the record, we're the good guys) here to host the new "On The Download" with the one and only fabulous co-op Survival Mode survival guide for the PC version of Madballs in: Babo...Invasion!