Here’s a nice little freebie to brighten your day.

Yesterday Valve started giving away an updated version of the top down shooter Alien Swarm. It’s a pretty good game. I spent some time with it this morning and it’s very enjoyable. Especially for free! You go around with your team and well, fight alien swarms. There is actually a lot more to it than that. It is definitely a deep game for what it is.

On top of just the game, Valve is also giving away the complete base code to the game. I don’t know what I could do with that, but I bet those of you smarter than I am have a good idea. You have to have a steam account to get this game, however I didn’t have one and it was no sweat.

Click HERE for the free Alien Swarm.

Microsoft announced an interesting promotion today. Each of the previous Gears of War games has had a rookie, from the Carmine family, that meets their doom over the course of the game. Whether or not this happens in the third game in the series is up to you. Starting July 29th, you can purchase one of two avatar t-shirts, one stating to save Carmine, the other for him to meet his demise. Whichever shirt sells the most is what will happen in the game.

Now before you start yelling “Money Grab!” like I almost did, all proceeds will will go to the Child’s Play charity, which if you are not familiar with is a great organization.

Lucky enough to be at Comic-Con in San Diego this week? You can grab one of these shirts in real life, at the NECA booth (#3145) for $20. I kind of hope he lives, but that seems unlikely.

San Diego Comic-Con 2010 hasn’t officially started yet, but Marvel is getting itself a nice head start.

Released today are the images for two concept art mini-posters, to go along with Marvel’s self-proclaimed “blockbuster double header” movies. (Very bold, these movies had better be awesome!) One is for Thor, and the other for Captain America: The First Avenger.

They are both pretty sweet. I’ve been trying to decide which one I like best, and I guess I’d have to say the Captain America one.

Do you like them? Do you want one for your own? Well these beauties will be handed out at the Marvel booth (#2329) at the convention, which starts tomorrow for preview night, and Thursday for the official start. If you want one, you should hurry over as soon as the convention opens. I would not expect these to last long. Not making it to SDCC in sunny San Diego?

Click on the images below and you can pretend you got one. Enjoy!

We have a couple of announcements out of Microsoft today. We have expected for a while that the motion controller, Kinect, would run $150. Well that was confirmed by Microsoft today. The controller would come with Kinect Adventures. Kinect launches November 4th.

Also announced today is an arcade version on the redesigned Xbox 360. This will run one penny shy of $200. It’s actually not a bad buy. It’s the same console as the $300 version, built in wifi, wireless controller, the whole bit. Difference is there is only 4 gigs of flash memory as opposed to a 250 gig hard drive. The new arcade console launches August 4th.

The best deal is the Kinect with Arcade bundle. Basically smash the above two paragraphs together and you get what’s in this bundle. This bundle launches same day as Kinect, November 4th.

Gears of War 2 fans have something to be excited about with next week’s Comic-Con in San Diego, even if they can’t attend — actually it might be better if you can’t. Check this out: Rod Fergusson, the executive producer of the Gears of War franchise for Epic games, posted on his Twitter account about 24 hours ago a little deal for multiple experience for Gears of War 2.

“Ok, here’s my bribe. The SDCC XP event will be # of my followers divided by 500. So 4000 followers means 8x XP”