Back during this year's Game Developers Conference, developer Torpex Games quietly announced the new co-op focused action game Schizoid ("skit-zoid") in a Microsoft presentation as the first game to make the jump from XNA development to a commercial Xbox Live Arcade title.

At the time, Microsoft was eager to push its XNA software, so we weren't able to find out many details about the game. But now, with Torpex planning to properly unveil Schizoid at this week's Gamefest developer conference, we got our hands on the first concrete information and video footage of the game.

The first big piece of news: it's not a shooter. That's rare enough for an original Live Arcade game, but when the first handful of screenshots surfaced at GDC, many speculated that the game was a shooter along the lines of Geometry Wars. As it turns out, the action in the game comes from taking your ship and physically ramming it into enemies you see on the screen.

The other bit of speculation that came up was that the game would use a blue and red color palette to determine which enemy each player could attack, and that part is true. To prevent players from running their ship into every enemy they see on the screen and taking the challenge out of it all, you can only "burst" enemies of your same color, so you have to attack enemies that look like you and avoid those that don't.

And that's where the co-op aspect comes into play. In each level, one player takes control of the red ship and one takes control of the blue ship; they each have to clear their respectively-colored enemies off the screen to protect one another and progress through the game. It's a bit similar to classic shooters like Silhouette Mirage and Ikaruga, but without the shooting and with more of a retro feel.

Despite the cooperative play focused design, you'll also be able to team up with an A.I. partner to play solo, so the co-op aspect doesn't prevent players from going at it alone, but it clearly seems like a game that will be at its best when played with a friend.

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