Last week, the United States Patent and Trademark Office assigned Microsoft, the publisher of such games as Gears of War, the ability to offer seamless switching from solo to co-op campaigns within squad-based shooter video games. You really have to patent such a thing?

Anyway, the patent, #7,559,834, was originally owned, and invented, by James York of Texas – Austin, Texas to be more exact. And was filed back in December of 2002. However, nearly a decade later, this is what Microsoft gains access to:

A squad-based shooter video game allows players to dynamically join and leave the game, while that game is in progress, without the players having to save and restart the game. When a new player joins an in-progress game, a new squad member is allocated to the new player and the screen is split to present a viewing panel for the new player that depicts scenes from the perspective of the new squad member. When an existing player leaves the game, the screen is unsplit to remove the viewing panel for the exiting player and that player’s squad member becomes part of the squad being controlled by the remaining player(s).

The patent came filled with co-op game sketches (one shown above). Anyway, the one shown above resembles a screenshot from the original Xbox co-op shooter Brute Force, developed by the now non-existent Digital Anvil. So for what reason would Microsoft patent this? With Natal’s release coming upon us, who knows what they are planning.

[Microsoft Patents Drop-In Co-Op In Shooters via Kotaku]

A developer that’s best known for their hit car crashing series, once developed a shooter game that was more then amazing to look at, it was amazing to play, and the game was simply entitled, Black. And in recent reports it was indicated that Black would be getting a sequel.

And now, however, it seems that the game would not be seeing a Sequel, at least not anytime soon. According to VG247, a very “well-informed source” confirmed that the reports of a Black follow-up are “not true”.

This news comes after a reports that on the Criterion games website there was a listing stating a game for a release in 2009 on the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC known as Black: Second Mission.

Today, we got some information on the games D-pad control system, which is much like the system that was used in Gears of War. This system will be fully optional and it uses the left stick and right stick much like in any normal TPS, Third person shooter. This system allows you to strafe left or right, and manipulate the camera and here’s how it will work. LT will ready the weapon for shooting and RT will fire your weapon. While in D-pad mode you cannot move or you can barely move. We also can confirm to you that some old BOW’s from the pre-RE4 era will make and return in this game.