Last week, Microsoft made a huge announcement regarding a main component of Xbox One's hardware. Very soon, a new version of the Xbox One without Kinect hardware will be available for purchase.

If not by now, Xbox One owners will be prompted to download Microsoft's latest update for the system tonight. Many of the new enhancements were suggested by the community as a whole, slowly but surely making a difference in the system's evolution.

Because the world needs more things that can judge and rank your ability to dance, Let's Sing And Dance from Voxler Games is a Kinect Xbox 360 release that watches your and your friend's moves, then scores your performance. Add as many singers as you want to the party and you've got your very own self-esteem destroying video game!

Welcome to this week’s Beyond Co-Op, where we look at interesting news around the gaming and entertainment industry that may not directly pertain to cooperative gaming culture. This week we have a couple of big Nintendo system announcements, EA’s future with online and “free-to-play”, Iran having issues with League of Legends, and Microsoft’s plans for the Kinect.

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.

In yet another marketing blunder by Microsoft, they have revealed that they will not be packaging a headset with their next gen Xbox One system. While it seems like a poor decision, Microsoft has publicly stated that they hope that players will turn to the Kinect for their voice chat needs. The mandatory Kinect, while capable of serving as a means of communicating with others over Xbox Live, has obvious negative implications involved with its use. The most egregious offense is that when we go online, we will not only hear people's voices, but we will also hear all of the background noise that goes along with it. The Kinect is also not ideal for gamers who are hearing impaired, or those that have children with sensitive ears. A simple and cheap headset would alleviate the issue, but it seems Microsoft's plans are much more exacting than that.

After my Disney Infinity preview, I was treated to an in-theater demo of Harmonix' upcoming Fantasia: Music Evolved. Now, I had heard that this was going to be a game based on the classic Fantasia films, but with the inclusion of modern music, which seemed to clash with the theme. I went in skeptical, but Harmonix decided to get experimental on me and now I'm warming up to the idea.

Get ready to dust off your best set of dancing shoes and head off to the dance lloor with Dance Central 3. The hit dancing game that utilizes the powers of the Kinect to register your dance moves is having a massive sale on downloadable tracks. In fact, the entire catalog of downloadable tracks for Dance Central 3 will be on sale until June 3.

After Marvel’s Avengers movie broke bundles of box office records, fans naturally wondered at the lack of a tie-in game. Ubisoft saw an opportunity and quickly announced their own motion-controlled game titled Marvel Avengers: Battle for Earth. With such a rushed development schedule and its licensed nature, the quality of the game obviously comes into question. But seeing its array of Marvel characters and co-op, we had to give it a shot.

Last year's Happy Action Theater wasn't exactly a traditional game, but that's one reason why it succeeded with the Kinec's non-traditional controls. Less than a year after the first installment, Double Fine returns with the more understandably titled Kinect Party. We can safely assume that just about every Kinect owner grabbed it for free oover the holidays, so the question becomes: does Kinect Party provide a better co-op experience and improve on its predecessor's handful of shortcomings?

See those kids hopping about in front of a studio made up to look like the perfect living room? They are playing Kinect Nat Geo TV Season Two, baby! And you can too, because the sequel/add-on to the original Kinect Nat Geo TV is now available to download on Xbox 360. This season promises eight more episodes of nature-themed education mixed with motion-controlled minigames, plus a new host: Brady Barr of Dangerous Encounters.