There is no mention of Kinect support on the box of next week's HD 10th-anniversary remake of Halo: Combat Evolved. That doesn't mean the features were cut. They weren't.

They're mentioned in the manual, which states that the game's optional Kinect support isn't on the disc. It will be added, on November 15, the day of the game's release, over Xbox Live.

If Kinect is a huge deal for Microsoft and Halo is, too, why not showcase the combo? The game's creators cite down-to-the-wire attention to quality.

"The Kinect features in Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary are something we have been working on for some time," a spokesperson for Microsoft's Halo division, 343 Industries, told Kotaku. "A we wanted to ensure it was a great experience, we chose not to rush things for the retail release and instead focus on a quality update timed for launch day. Because the Kinect features require users have access to Xbox Live, it's not something we could advertise on the box as shipping with the game."

The Kinect support will auto-download over Xbox Live when they put the game in their console. According to the game's manual "players witha Kinect sensor can take advantage of a a number of Kinect-enabled gesture and voice features, including the ability to select and analyze enemies and objects—unlocking vital intelligence about them in the Library—and to move among in-game menus."

The review embargo for the $40 remake lifts on November 14, a day before the Kinect support is set to be available. Some reviewers may have gotten an early look at the features but we'll be waiting until the 15th to test them out. Here's hoping they benefit from the extra development time they were given.

A message sent just now from Valve Corporation head Gabe Newell says credit card numbers and other personal information were inside a database compromised during a defacement attack on the Steam forums this Sunday.

Valve is advising all of its Steam customers to keep close eye on their credit card activity, as those numbers were inside a database the hackers penetrated during the larger attack, Newell wrote. The Steam Forums are currently closed. Steam itself is operating.

"We do not have evidence that encrypted credit card numbers or personally identifying information were taken by the intruders, or that the protection on credit card numbers or passwords was cracked. We are still investigating," Newell wrote. "We don't have evidence of credit card misuse at this time. Nonetheless you should watch your credit card activity and statements closely."

The database exposed during the attack "contained information including user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information," Newell said in the statement.

The Steam Forums are currently offline as Valve continues its investigation and recovers from the attack. When the forums return, all users will be required to change their passwords. Users who used the same password on the Steam Forums as they did on other sites are advised to change those passwords as well.

"We do not know of any compromised Steam accounts, so we are not planning to force a change of Steam account passwords (which are separate from forum passwords). However, it wouldn't be a bad idea to change that as well, especially if it is the same as your Steam forum account password." Newell wrote.

"I am truly sorry this happened, and I apologize for the inconvenience," he said.

Getting a sharp, polished shooter experience on iOS still remains something of a holy grail for both developers and device owners. There've been a few valiant efforts over the last year, with ShadowGun and Rage: Mutant Bash TV probably foremost amongst them. Now, you'll be able to add one more to your apps list today with the launch of Epoch.

Built by Uppercut Games, Epoch finds one de-activated robot soldier coming back to awareness in an era where humanity's apparently disappeared. The heroic automaton fights his way through warring factions of droids to learn the fate of the human he was assigned to protect. The gorgeous graphics tip you off that the game was built on Unreal and, if the controls match the visuals, Epoch might just be this year's shooter equivalent to Infinity Blade. It's out now on Apple's App Store.

Epoch [iTunes]

My favorite location in The Legend of Zelda is its expansive desert region. That zone begins at the mouth of a mine, where technology appears to be more advanced than it ever has been in any other Zelda game.

I want those of you who are on the fence about this game or those of you who don't mind some video tourism to take a look at this place. And listen to it, too. I'll take you to the edge of the area's first wonderful surprise, but I won't spoil what happens next. That's for Skyward Sword players to enjoy for themselves.

This new Zelda excels at bringing players to interesting, beautiful, unusual places. I hope that comes through in this clip. Enjoy.

For more of my favorite 30-second Skyward Sword moments, go here.

Last year EverQuest II dipped its toes in free-to-play waters splitting its services into two separate games: The regular EverQuest II, and the limited free-to-play EverQuest II Extended. Next month the game puts that silliness behind it and dives in head-first.

They're calling it "free-to-play your way", a fancy way of indicating that Sony Online Entertainment is finally ready to proudly stand beside the other former subscription-only MMO titles that now make up the majority of the market. I had a chance to speak with EverQuest II executive producer Dave Georgeson about the new program and the game's next expansion pack, Age of Discovery, earlier this week.

"If you boil it way down, all we're really doing is making it a lot easier for people to pay however it is they want to pay," Georgeson began. "That's the whole point of this conversion. We still have recurring subscriptions, those are still available, but there's also non-recurring subscriptions, which are new to the MMO industry as far as I know...and we've simplified the membership matrix alot, so that we can make this as easy for people to understand as possible."

I've gone ahead an attached the new membership matrix here. Aside from combining the two different players bases into one, the main changes are that the Bronze level from EQII Extended has been renamed Free, the Platinum level is going away, and the Gold level will enjoy new benefits, including access to all classes and races it was formerly denied.

One class that won't be available for free is the Beastlord, making its EverQuest II debut in the Age of Discovery expansion next month. Along with the pet-friendly class, the expansion also brings a unique new dungeon builder feature, in which players collect random pieces and hero characters from monster drops and construct their own deathtraps, ready for other players to explore and rate. It sounds a bit like City of Heroes' Architect feature, only instead of the players themselves running through the adventure, they'll take on the roles of legendary EverQuest heroes, villains, and creatures instead.

"It's very easy to make a customized experience that nobody else has ever seen before," said Georgeson. Players will be able to place monster spawners, define AI behaivors, and, in phase two, litter their dungeons with traps for the unwary.

While the new expansion pack will run players $39.99, the majority of what EverQuest II has to offer goes free next month. That includes the entire game and all expansions up to and including Sentinel's Fate. Limitations on completely free players remains rather severe, but hey, free is free, and free your way sounds even better.

"All we're really trying to do is letting people decide what they want to do, when they want to do it."

Sounds fair to me. Hit up the EverQuest II Free-to-Play FAQ for more information.

The man behind monster hits FarmVille, Mafia Wars and CityVille is scrambling to reclaim some of the stock options he handed out to long-time employees, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Citing several employees, the Wall Street Journal article says Zynga CEO Mark Pincus and a cadre of executives decided last year that they needed to get some of their stock options back from employees. The story says that the company approached some employees and gave them two options: Return the options or get fired.

The demands came as the company was preparing for its initial public offering, a move that could make any long-term, stock-holding employee rich if things went well. The Journal says that the executives worries that they were going to create a "Google Chef" situation, referencing the search engine chefs who fell into $20 million worth of stock after that company went public.

That returned stock, the article continues, was to be used to attract new talent. It comes off a bit like buyer's remorse.

Zynga didn't comment for the article and when reached today by Kotaku, they again declined to comment. But Fortune has another take on the situation.

The finance pub says that asking for stock back from under-performing employees isn't that unusual and that it's better than just firing them. Instead, the author guesses, those employees were demoted to a point that really shouldn't have had the stock in the first place.

Without Zynga weighing in on the issue, and with the impacted employees remaining unnumbered and unnamed (two sources were cited in the Journal story), it's hard to see what really happened here. But I'm sure it's not the sort of thing a company about to go public wants floating around.

Howdy folks, welcome to week two of Kotaku Game Club: Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception. (Extra colons are extra fun.) We're going over the middle leg of the Uncharted 3 adventure today.

In case you missed last week and/or every single Game Club to date, The Kotaku Game Club convenes to analyze and discuss games piece by piece. Let me be the first one to say that it's been a challenge not to just zip through all of Uncharted 3, but the reward is a focused analysis of aspects in games that might not make it into a review.

Before you continue into the discussion, a little disclaimer: There will be massive spoilers below from the first two thirds of Uncharted 3. If you haven't played far into the campaign, yet, this might not be the post for you. Conversely, if you've already beat the game, we will only be discussing up to chapter 18 today. Please try not mention anything that happens at the end of the game until next week, when we'll tackle the ending.

Alright, here's a jumping-off point in case you didn't have an issue you already wanted to discuss:

Do you think Uncharted 3's increased emphasis on combat has hurt or helped the game's formula?

The chapters we played this week included some of the most combat-heavy sequences in the game so far. Though there were puzzles early on, by chapter 18 it seems that those sections had been replaced with bigger shootouts. Do you think that the extra shooting makes the game more exciting from moment to moment, or do you feel like it negatively effects the game's flow?

At next week's meeting of the Kotaku Game Club be discussing the last chapters Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception. Make sure to come back to Kotaku next Thursday, November 17th, at 4pm Eastern.

It's the elephant in the room at the core of Bethesda's lauded action/RPG that's out tomorrow: how does one get dragon blood in the family tree, anyway? YouTube video purveyors The GameStation and the Warp Zone answer that question in NSFW fashion in their latest short. I love the quasi-medieval illustrations in the family journal. No one should have any questions after looking at those.

Skyrim - Tale of the DragonBorn

Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 are two of the most hyped video games of this fall season. The people who buy them—and who will enjoy them—may only play half of them. Yet they pay full price.

The buzz for these games is on their multiplayer, their presentation of virtual war as the most fun and popular online game this side of poker. Their single-player? Plenty of gamers ignore it. Others just play solo and never play multi, yet publishers EA and Activision make and sell those halves as part of single games and charge full price.

But there's an experiment going on, it seems. EA, last night, said it would now sell its early-2011 boxing game, Fight Night Champion in parts, digitally. They are selling the whole thing for $30 but will charge just $5 for single-player and $10 more for a basic online mode. We don't know how or why EA is testing this out, but it brings up a pair of questions, questions for you to answer, because, really, is this about a boxing game?

Or could it some day be about something else?

There's a new crop of small-developer PC releases to be had on the cheap over at Indie Royale. It's a quintet of games this time, as opposed to the four games that served as the site's inaugural bundle.

This time around, the offering includes CharliesGames' Scoregasm, a space shooter set in a cosmic, branching-path gameworld, and the visually stunning action/puzzle hybrid NightSky by Nicalis. Red Redemption's Fate of the World, a strategy game that has you tackling the climate crisis, is also on the list, along with an adventure game two-fer—Ben There, Dan That! and Time Gentlemen, Please! from Size Five Games. As always, the earlier you buy, the cheaper the bundle is. Right now, you can grab all of these for $1.99. Tomorrow, things could be pricier. You've been warned.

Indie Royale