Late delivery! This information post was supposed to go live on Friday, but in hoping that some new details would come from DICE's recent media event I held off. Bad call - DICE and EA are keeping the pin in the grenade for now.

There's a brand new, co-op friendly, demo for LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars out now on Xbox Live.  The demo includes both space and ground levels to try out as you take on the evil Empire with your army of clones.  At your disposal are new weapons, news characters and new force abilities.  Perhaps the most promising feature though for the full game is going to be the "multi-layered space combat" missions.  

Obsidian Entertainment held a recent hands-on event for their upcoming Action RPG, Dungeon Siege 3. Rumors about co-op play have been circulating around the net for months. Co-Optimus had the opportunity to go to Obsidian's studios in Irvine, CA, and set the record straight.

I want to paint this on the side of a van.

This is what a Left 4 Dead Community love in looks like

March is sneaking up on us, bringing a bounty of games. Among the titles of games landing in March is Shogun 2: Total War. If you're still on the fence about this strategy game from the Creative Assembly, digitial distributor Steam gets the demo tomorrow for your demo-ing pleasure. Relatively little is known about what exactly the demo will contain, aside from allowing "all armchair samurai to test their skills in epic land battles and on Total War: Shogun 2’s gorgeous new campaign map." Maybe it will include some crazy weather phenomena - who knows?

At a recent Electronic Arts event in NYC we got some hands on time with a little known title called The Fancy Pants Adventures. The platformer is based on a flash game of the same name, but this time comes fully featured and with co-op. Here's our impressions of the XBLA and PSN title.

Bulletstorm, People Can Fly's much hyped-first person shooter/splatter fest, releases tomorrow.  Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 owners could play a demo for the game as early as January 25th.  PC owners...still don't have a demo.  You would think a game that has been this heavily marketed (Halo and Call of Duty parodies, Facebook content, Cliff Bleszinski's constant Tweets) would have an early demo on all platforms. According to Vice President and co-founder of Epic Games, Marc Rein, (or more accurately, according to his Twitter account):

You probably don’t remember this one, but we previewed Islands of Wakfu back at PAX 2009 - and then we didn’t really hear anything about it. Apparently that was because the developer Ankama was hard at work finishing up the local co-op Xbox LIVE Arcade exclusive.

It’s something we’ve thought about, and finally someone had the opportunity to ask - but where is the co-op campaign for the testosterone-fest Bulletstorm? We know, we know. There is always Anarchy mode, complete with four-player co-op - but what about the story? According to the interview with Epic game’s Cliff "Cliffy B" Bleszinski (avid patrons of Bulletstorm), co-op unfortunately broke the game.

Do you remember all the hub-bub Gandalf made about the northern front in The Lord of the Rings?  It was something akin to "Many Bothans...died...to bring us this information."  Subtle, but ominous.  I may be crossing my trilogy streams.   You knew things were going to be okay, or else Tolkein would have made the heroes of the War in the North the main characters in his magnum opus.  Maybe Gandalf was more confident in the Northern Army because they didn't base their entire battle strategy on a hobbit (the most kill-able creature in Middle-Earth) performing black ops behind enemy lines.

Twin stick shooters used to seem like a dime a dozen, but they really offer some of the best co-op experiences out there. A new EA published title called Gatling Gears looks to expand on the genre adding in some RPG-lite elements. We went hands on with the game at a recent event in our latest preview.