Batman: Arkham Asylum & City ditch Games for Windows Live, slash 75% off for this weekend

The tumor that is Games For Windows Live has now been excised from another game - two games, in fact. Following the welcome news that BioShock 2 had been cured of its reliance on Microsoft's insidious service, both Batman: Arkham Asylum and Arkham City have undergone successful surgery , swapping GFWL for the much less awful Steamworks. In honor of being free at last, the games have been given a 75% price cut for this weekend.

If you already own the games on Steam (and they're installed), just let the patch download. If you bought them elsewhere, simply register the CD keys with Steam. Steam community users are reporting that this will grant you a free upgrade to the GOTY editions, which is nice.

You might want to hold off if you have a game in progress, however, as you'll be unable to retrieve your GFWL-infected save games.

The Steamworks versions of both games now feature achievements, cloud saving, Big Picture mode, trading cards and proper controller support. (Ta, Joystiq )

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.