While more than a few of us spent the past weekend (and this past week) clicking through "just one more turn" in Civilization VI, we have not been doing it together.

After PSN, Hearthstone, League of Legends and Path of Exile, hackers have turned their attention to Microsoft's Xbox Live service. Continuing a distributed denial of service attack (DDOS) against the service, Microsoft's servers are having a hard time mitigating the problem. The end result is difficulty logging in, joining parties, and connecting to other players games.

There are unconfirmed reports today that PSN has been hacked, though it's unclear as to the severity of it. Hopefully it's nothing like the situation that happened just a few years ago. PSN has been unreachable for most of the morning and the official AskPlayStation Twitter account confirmed the outage - while also responding to thousands of tweets from users.

Welcome to 2014 and the latest edition of Beyond Co-Op, our week's end news piece that accumulates a few of the more interesting non co-op stories from the past several days. With the end of 2013, there were a lot of "best of" lists and "what to expect for gaming in 2014" going around. Once you get past those, however, there were a couple pieces of note, like a piece of malware stealing WoW players' account information and a new Ace Attorney game in the works.

It always boggles my mind why more PC games don't support split-screen play.  A lot of gamers definitely have a PC with the horse power to support the video rendering required and many folks have gamepads hooked up to their PCs with most games supporting that method of play already.  It's especially mind boggling with a game like Borderlands 2, which out of the box on the console supports some of the best split-screen configurations we've seen to date.  Sadly though, PC gamers are left with making up their own solutions.

Blizzard have released a special statement regarding all Battle.net accounts stating that there was some sort of hack or "unauthorized illegal access" to a large quantity of US Battle.net accounts.  According to Blizzard no credit card or billing address information was obtained, but email addresses, encrypted passwords, and security questions were all stolen.  While the chance of the information actually being utilized is slim, Blizzard recommends you change your password immediately. 

Resistance 3 has been patched to version 1.05, which means the next time you fire up the game you'll be waiting for yet another download on your PS3.  Still, with the patch comes several fixes for all aspects of the game including single player, multiplayer and of course co-op.  The biggest fix is to one that could potentially spoil campaign progression for a guest player in co-op.  

Valve has reported that their Steam has been compromised one day after their forums were reportedly hacked as well and taken offline.  Valve president and founder Gabe Newell released this statement.

A common question we get when multiplatform releases include the PC around Co-Optimus HQ is  - "Does the PC version support split-screen too?"

It seems the PlayStation Network isn't the only console gaming service that is currently dealing with hackers.  Though it seems on a much smaller scale, Microsoft is warning users currently playing Modern Warfare 2 that they may receive "title specific messages that are phishing attempts."  

It appears that something wicked walks the Borderlands, and evil comes in the form of... hacked bobble heads!  Modded bobble heads full of cash are hacking players' shields and weapons, giving them an unfair advantage compared to legit players.  Worst of all, it can happen unknowingly to the innocent, as related by longtime Co-Optimus user Shazoo in our forums...

Remember how pissed off you were when you found out you could only get Juggernaut for Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 if you preordered from Gamestop?  Remember how you wanted to smash your head through a wall in anger?  Please remain calm, we're about to tell you how you can stick it to the man and get Juggernaut for yourself without setting a foot inside Gamestop.