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The successful Assassin's Creed franchise gets another Community Co-Op challenge this week with this one centering not around in-game kills but Facebook. The previous challenge for Rome By Night was fulfilled after 18 days of slaughter, but this challenge for another map, Venezia By Night, will require one million people to "Friend" the Assassin's Creed page on Facebook.

Just before the end of 2010 the PC players of the Vietnam expansion to Battlefield: Bad Company 2 unlocked the Battle for Hastings map for their platform. DICE has apparently relented and unlocked the map for the PS3 and Xbox 360 without having them reach the 69 million team action requirement to do so. This was done with a pleasant Happy New Year message to their loyal fans.

Joystiq's writeup mentions that at the time of the unlock the PS3 had 34 million actions and the Xbox 360 had 46 million actions earned. Those aren't poor numbers, but it's the rate of new actions that's key. I ran some numbers using our original post about this challenge and I suspect it's a little bit of the numbers combined with some marketing that led to this decision. Let's take a look.

Battlefield 1943 had its own community co-op (CCO) challenge and Electronic Arts has once again stepped up to the plate with Battlefield: Bad Company 2. This time around there is a challenge relating to its Vietnam expansion.

Each platform -- PS3, PC, and Xbox 360 -- is separately counting the number of "team actions" for the game at the official site. Perform 69 million of them and that platform will get the new Battle for Hastings map for free. What's a team action? Resupplying, reviving, healing, spotting, and repairing. It sounds to me like that just means you play the game to get ahead.

The official counter is here and as of today sits at 14.7 millon for 360, 9.9 million for PS3, and 23.5 million on PC. They started counting on December 22nd, so it doesn't look like it'll take long to hit the goals.

Seen on the PlayStation Blog and BFBC2 Blog.

The latest installment in the Assassin's Creed franchise has sold quite well this time around, and it's the first of the three games to feature online multiplayer modes.

Ubisoft has announced that there is a new multiplayer map for the game that will be given out for free, but only once the players of the game hit a certain milestone. This is clearly a community co-op effort, and in this case the score to reach is a total of 25 million kills added together across both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 versions of the game.

Having both platforms included sounds generous, but to date both platforms have collectively hit only 2.6 million kills. Players have a ways to go to earn this one.

Seen on The Escapist.

PS Nation Podcast Episode 192 featured an interview with Housemarque, Finnish developers of the hit PSN title Super Stardust HD as well as Dead Nation, a 3rd person Zombie twin-stick zombie shooter out today on the PlayStation Network in North America. Super Stardust HD featured a wide variety of leaderboards, including monthly ones that would reset and allow persistent players to temporarily rise to the top of the pack if they worked at it.

Dead Nation is bringing along another full set of score chase-inducing leaderboards, but also has a community co-op feature in the form of a world leaderboard indicating a percentage of zombies killed per country.