With the avalanche of fall releases in our rearview mirror, I’ve found myself heading over to Marketplace more and more to see what sort of downloadable content is popping up. December’s going to be a quiet month — the next retail release I’m personally looking forward to is Condemned 2, and that’s in February. In the meantime, I’m crossing my fingers that Marketplace might finally live up to its potential. And after digging around, I’ve come to one conclusion: it’s time for EA’s obnoxious DLC to stop cluttering up the listings and give us some real, actual extensions of our favorite single-player experiences.

Case in point: I’m actually enjoying the hell out of Need for Speed ProStreet right now. It’s a weird mix of Forza and NFS that happens to suit me just right (though I can totally see why the game pisses off the NFS faithful), so I went to check out the DLC for the game. Not only can you buy a “collector’s edition” that merely adds a few events and cars that should’ve been part of the game itself, but you can also buy packs that unlock all the cars and upgrades that you’d normally have to earn. The kicker? All these downloads are 108 KB in size, which is an indicator that all the content is already on the disc, and you’d just be downloading the “key” to unlock it. To put it bluntly, that’s f---ed up. For $60, EA ought to be giving us everything they can cram onto a DVD. That they’re actually planning in advice to sell bits of the finished game after it comes out makes me spittin’ mad. DLC should be cool extensions and add-ons that the developer gives (or sells to) its fans after the game’s been out for a bit, and this is just wrong. You can bet they’ll be seeing none of my MS Points.

On the other hand, any day now Codemasters will be doing the exact opposite with Overlord by releasing a DLC pack that adds both single-player action and multiplayer maps. That, I can’t wait for. Overlord was one of the quirkiest games of the summer in a good way, and more smiting-of-good after I’ve had a bit of a rest sounds awesome. Here’s praying that Mass Effect follows suit and does something really interesting and unique with its DLC. While I’d love to see that ASAP, I’d rather wait and make sure we don’t just get a few more uncharted worlds stocked with more pirates.

The other DLC frontier worth touching on is the new Xbox Originals. $15 for an old-ass Xbox 1 game just makes no sense to me, but …I still bought one. At least it was Psychonauts, which I’m embarrassed to confess to never having played before, and as expected, I was instantly mesmerized. But I do promise to never give Microsoft 1,200 more Points for an Xbox 1 game again. Honest.