Next week, a trio of Red Dead Redemption's pre-order bonuses—the Deadly Assassin Outfit, the Golden Guns Weapon Pack and the War Horse—will finally be made available as downloadable content via Xbox Live and PlayStation Network.

If you've been waiting for those digital rewards, you've been waiting for close to year. Rockstar says that won't happen with its next game, L.A. Noire. The 1940s detective adventure is saddled with a quartet of retailer pre-order "exclusives" that include special outfits, cases and other digital goodies.

Rockstar gives us just one more reason to avoid retail pre-order exclusive nonsense in an update today:

Apologies to everyone for having to wait so long to get these available as DLC as there were some unanticipated technical delays - for those of you inquiring about the expected availability of the L.A. Noire preorder bonuses as DLC after game release, those should become available as DLC much, much sooner.

That's refreshing, though doing away with pre-order exclusives like this would be much more ideal.

For Red Dead Redemption fans looking to get their hands on the aforementioned digital goods, Rockstar Games will be selling each of them at 99 cents a pop next week.

Having done only one unboxing - and it was of fried chicken - I feel I may post this video without it being an overt display of my hypocrisy. Unboxing videos have always struck me like childbirth videos, albeit without the blood, umbilical cord, placenta, etc. As YouTube's Cool Gear Reviews notes, they're exciting only to the person filming them, and packed with details I could live without knowing.

Let's End Unboxing Videos [YouTube]

Spicy Horse's long-in-the-waiting sequel to 2000's American McGee's Alice looks lovelier than ever in a quintet of new images released by Electronic Arts today. See the intricate detail of Alice's vorpal blade and pepper mill-on-evil teapot action in the gallery above.

Alice: Madness Returns comes to the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Mac and PC on June 14th.

Ars Technica reports that sources within Sony's hosting provider belittled Anonymous' cyber-attack as "medium strength," and something that only "annoyed our network engineers." The hosting service's plan is to wait out Anonymous until the attackers get bored.

Sony sites have gone up and down through the week, to the point that Anonymous called off an assault on PlayStation Network, considering gamers using the service to be blameless victims. But the network engineer Ars quoted said sites only went down early in the assault, as they maneuvered to block what was a large number of incoming IP addresses carrying out the attack. Sony's jobs site is reportedly the current target.

Since the blocks went into place, it's been mostly smooth sailing - though Sony has contracted with the cyber-attack mitigation service Prolexic to keep its domains running. Anonymous evidently has experience attacking both Prolexic and this hosting provider.

Anonymous, offended by Sony's conduct in litigation against the hacker George Hotz, initiated the attack earlier this week. Sony yesterday conceded that an outside cyber-attack may have been the source of network outages this week, but didn't blame Anonymous specifically, probably not wishing to give it publicity.

Source: Anonymous attacks on Sony annoying, not much more [Ars Technica. Image by Vincent Diamante]

Famicom Carts | Mint condition Nintendo games from Super Potato, from a long time ago. (Photo: Michael McWhertor)

Bedtime Stories

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Now You Can Shop GameStop On Facebook For Some Reason

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Nintendo's Game Boy is the instrument of choice for some musicians, due to its charming chiptune sound and the prominence Little Sound Dj. But artist Sebastian Bender has taken a different approach to using the 8-bit handheld as musical maker.

Listen as Bender flicks, taps, scratches and drums the body of the Game Boy to impressive musical effect, expertly bringing da funk while also using the game machine's headphone port and battery connectors for sweet soothing tones. Awesome.

If this is the kind of Game Boy music you want to hear more of, grab the MP3 from Bender's YouTube page.

GAME BOY MUSIC (but not the kind you're thinking of) [YouTube via Tiny Cartridge]

Remember The Hipster Little Mermaid meme? Traci Hines has made her come to life.

One of these jiggling, scantily clad ladies may be the "babe" you'll be slapping on the keister in Duke Nukem Forever's "Capture The Babe" mode. So why not familiarize yourself with the various fetishes and archetypes of the game's fairer sex.

Yes, there are schoolgirls and strippers and even girls wearing cat ears. Yes, Duke will presumably have ample blowjobs bestowed upon him by the women of Duke Nukem Forever. Yes, someone is going to be offended (by design) by Gearbox Software and 3D Realms' attempts to be politically incorrect.

Even with the mosaic applied to dancer breasts in this "Babes" video, consider this look at the upcoming PS3, PC and Xbox 360 game NSFW.

Dungeon Siege III might be delayed, but that just gives Steam users more time to play through Dungeon Siege and Dungeon Siege II. They'll get both games free as soon as their preorder goes through. That's a lot of dungeons.

As forewarned, Valve has released the first portion of its Portal digital comic at IGN. In it, we meet Rat Man, rank and file Aperture Science workers and learn more about the origins of GlaDOS. Read Portal 2: Lab Rat now.