The thrice-yearly Ludum Dare competition recently wrapped up its 26th round of lightning-speed game development challenges, receiving over 2,300 submissions from game creators the world over. Participants are allotted a scant 48 hours to make a game from start to finish, each one working from a central theme. This time around that theme was "minimalism", teaching us all a lesson about doing a lot using very little. Or something like that.

Here's something you don't see every day: a browser game with online co-op support! Ninja Kiwi has taken the ever-popular Bloons TD 5 and included a two player online co-op mode, complete with loot sharing and four new levels. At its core, Bloons TD 5 is a casual tower defense game, only instead of towers shooting arrows and creeps running around, it's all about invading balloons and monkeys throwing darts.

There's a new game that just hit closed beta in the free to play browser based market that's caught our eye.  It's called Gunshine.net and its from a new company named Supercell that was founded by ex-Remedy developers and invested in by ex-Sony executive Phil Harrison's investment firm.