I've bitched about this before, as has Psycho Gorilla, but there was a time not too long ago when game developers—and I don't mean just independent devs, but mainstream ones as well—would often create post-release content for their games and make it available online for free. It was a sort of thank you to the people who bought their games and a way to extend the life of the product without relying on tacked-on multiplayer modes or charging people—the same people who were kind enough to buy the game in the first place—for superfluous content that was held back specifically so that it could be sold on top of the initial $60 cost of the game.

If you are unfortunate enough to have not lived through this time, just know that this is how map packs were once disseminated before Microsoft and Activision discovered that they could charge you $10 for them.

Some companies still get this right, however. Valve, despite our differences, has been very good at supporting their games with new content. Yeah, they'll charge you for hats and other items in Team Fortress 2, but there's nothing that you can't potentially get for free if you play the game for long enough. Every public item that I'm aware of can be found or crafted if you're patient enough. Gabe the Hutt simply knows that many of us are too hopped up on Sugar Smacks to do things the hard way, and that's how he makes his billions of dollars from digital clothing.

The people at Supergiant Games are another such group that has embraced the old ways, as they're offering the first piece of DLC for Bastion—a new campaign sequence titled "The Stranger's Dream"—free of charge. It'll be out on December 14, and you can find all other details on SG's website. I should mention, however, that the "free" part is only applicable to those who own the PC version of Bastion. People who were stupid enough to buy it on Xbox Live Arcade will have to pay ~$1 (80 Microsoft Points) for the content because of Microsoft's policy on the matter. Hey, look, there's Microsoft being dicks about DLC again.

It shouldn't even be necessary to include that last disclaimer, but Microsoft really likes being told to fuck off. I'm not even going to mention information exclusively relevant to Xbox 360 owners anymore because if that's your primary gaming platform you don't deserve to read my words. There's a good reason why the Xbox 360 is associated with the absolute worst members of the gaming community: all of the stereotypes are true. I also hold Microsoft responsible for most of the worst shit of the last decade, including (but not limited to) charging an access fee to play non-persistent world games (i. e. anything other than MMOs) online, Games for Windows Live, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the holocaust. Not the Jewish holocaust, though. That's just how I refer to this one really bad day when I ran out of milk and the cashier at the grocery store didn't wish me a good day. In Canada that's an offence punishable by up to thirty life sentences in prison. It would be death, but a Canadian hasn't intentionally killed another living creature since 1867, and we weren't even an actual country at the time. In fact, that event was the reason we signed the Constitution Act. We were simply tired of the British making people angry enough to kill.

Via IndieGames.com

Is The Witcher 2 worth $24? What if you throw in the first game for free? I honestly don't know. Both games look like Dragon Age clones with more hardcore sex, which doesn't say much. The sex scenes in Bioware's games make me question whether or not anyone who works there knows what sex is. When I was five years old I thought that a boy and a girl being naked together was sex, which made me really worry about the baths my sister and I shared when we were babies. Bioware appears to be at about that same level of understanding.

Anyway, from now until December 10 The Witcher 1 + 2 are on sale for $24 at GOG.com. Did I decide anywhere in the first paragraph whether or not this is a good deal? No? Shit. I was hoping that me from the past would have covered this already so that I wouldn't have to. Look, if you like games based on—I'm going to say Swedish?—fantasy novels that include a lot of animated sex for you to jerk off to and then deny it on your favourite gaming forums later even though nobody but you brought it up, you probably can't go wrong by taking advantage of the situation. If you're like me and have a vivid enough imagination that your own dreams contain the only pornography that will ever satisfy you, you might want to wait for The Witcher 2 to hit the $10 mark.

Holy shit, it's been a while since I've had a reason to talk about Good Old Games (that website that sells good old games). The last time was when they were selling Duke Nukem 3D for, like, two bucks or something. What the hell happened to them after that?

Anyway, right now you can buy Alien Shooter and it's expansions for a cool $2.39. Or maybe it's hot? I'm not sure what causes an increase or drop in monetary temperature. The press release says that the sale ends at 7:59 AM EDT on November 16, though, which I'm pretty sure has passed already but the price on the website is still discounted, so take advantage while you can.

Alien Shooter the first isn't as good as Alien Shooter 2, which is also available at GOG for a totally reasonable and lukewarm price of $5.99, but as I mentioned in my review of AS2, the amount of fun to be had while shooting aliens is directly proportionate to the number of aliens there are to shoot. So if you've already killed every last illegal immigrant in Alien Shooter 2, it's worth it to play the original so that you can kill their Mexican grandparents. Stop the crisis before it starts.

Buy Alien Shooter + Expansions for $2.39 at GOG.com

"Who will pay for Denis's whores now?!" said Denis.

You know Denis Dyack, the outspoken head of that company that made Eternal Darkness, Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes and then crapped things off with Two Human? He's the guy who complained about how hard it is to work with Unreal Engine 3 and tried to sue Epic Games over it, even though every other development studio was easily putting out triple-A games with the technology (see: Mass Effect, Batman: Arkham Asylum and nearly every other game released in the last three years). Yeah, you know who I'm talking about. That guy.

Well, now he can also be called the guy who (probably) laid off 75% of his staff because his company hadn't released a good game since 2004. Did you know that Too Human was supposed to be a trilogy? Nobody could stand to play one of them, so who the fuck would pay for two more?

I've never liked Dyack—he ranks up there with David Jaffe and Jonathan Blow on the pompous game developers scale—so I'm happy to see him fail, but I do feel for the employees he's laid off. Perhaps they'd like to come work for me. I can't pay them in real money, but I can pay them in uplifting words. "You did a good job there, David; and, Kevin? You keep up the great work."

Via 1Up.

I wholeheartedly blame everyone but me for this. You guys loved your Humble Bundles so much that they spawned a copycat. IndieRoyale is this new bastard's name, and there are some important features that you need to be aware of before you let your daughter go on a date with this new service.

Bundles are released periodically and instead of letting you set any price for the games on offer, as the Humble Bundle does, there's actually a minimum amount that slowly creeps upward. You can pay more than the minimum and force the price back down for others, but why would anyone ever do that?

So, the guys running IndieRoyale are cleverly disguised assholes, which is actually great. They slowly raise the price of each bundle and rely on the generosity of others to reduce it, which means that they're going to be making no less than infinity dollars. They also don't bother with any of that "charity" nonsense, because fuck kids. No, not in that way. Stop fucking that child! You don't know where it's been!

You just missed the IndieRoyale Launch Bundle, but that's okay because it wasn't that good. Gemini Rue is sort of interesting if you're the type who swears that ScummVM is the best game engine ever created, and Sanctum is an all right tower defense game, but nothing too special. The next bundle starts in nine days and is titled "the Difficult 2^nd Bundle," so I'm assuming the games will be hard or something. Unlike your penis, which I hear is quite soft even in the bedroom. Hiyo!

Hold onto your self esteems, kids, because there's more!

The Humble Bundle jackasses have teamed up with something called a Lexaloffle and now you can buy a game called Voxatron for whatever price you want. Voxatron is an arcadey-style shooter with voxel graphics and a level editor, so in other words it's pretty sweet. But allowing people to name any price for it is exactly the sort of bullshit I've come to expect from the independent gaming community. They're on a mission to subvert capitalism! You can't just leave food on a plate and tell people that they can pay for it if they really want to. How will anyone get rich doing that!?

This whole thing makes me sick and I don't want to live on this planet anymore.

Click here to check out IndieRoyale

Click here to buy Voxatron

Apparently Fox only wants to renew The Simpsons for one more season, and that's if the voice actors all agree to a massive pay cut. Of course the actors would rather see the show canceled than have their salaries reduced by nearly 50%, because that's like choosing between letting Hitler die and punching yourself in the dick forever.

Earlier this week, Fox issued a statement saying it "cannot produce future seasons under its current financial model," and that it hoped for "an agreement with the voice cast that allows 'The Simpsons' to go on entertaining audiences with original episodes for many years to come."

"Entertaining audiences" sounds like an excellent business model for a television show and I'd love to see The Simpsons go on to attempt it. It's important to shake things up and change focus every 23 seasons or so.

Via Reuters.

Hey, look! It's River Song's life in chronological order! Except, since everything occurs in the opposite general order of the natural flow of time, I guess this would be reverse-chronological, or anti-chronological. I had an Auntie Chronological, but she could never keep track of time. Ha-ha!

I do realize that this is the second day in a row that I've reposted something I found on Topless Robot, but give me a break. I'm not really into this blogging shit. I'm like the girl from The Craft who was only hanging out with the wicca girls because she didn't have any other friends, but then she turned out to be the most powerful one in the end. Just like that, except in my version I get to totally lez out with Fairuza Balk.

I'm the worst kind of Doctor Who fan (and also shit at segueing to a new paragraph, but that's a different story). I've seen about a dozen of the Matt Smith episodes and really liked those, but I'm not dedicated enough to track down the older episodes or wait for them to re-air. So I go on Wikipedia and read the story synopsis to fill in the blanks, and then go to forums and argue with real fans who have actually seen the show. If I were to make a face while doing this, it would look something like this: