Hasbro has struck a deal with Zynga to produce toys and games based on the social developer's catalogue of rich, nuanced IPs, which is great news if you've ever found yourself wishing you could somehow continue to give Zynga all of your money, even when you're away from your computer and smartphone.

Now, Hasbro's definition of "games" is more board-oriented than Zynga's, and while the licensing arrangement allows for "co-branded merchandise," it doesn't allow Zynga to make games based on Hasbro brands. The first products will hit store shelves sometime this fall, and while no specifics toys or board games have been announced we've got a feeling that My Little Ponyville and Ouija With Friends aren't that unlikely.

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So much Reckoning this weekend.

What's everyone playing?

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Tuesday is Valentine's Day, and in addition to being a day full of expectations and guilt, it's now a day where you can be rick-rolled by a damn video game in the sanctity of your own home. The "Gold Star My Heart" Pack drops Tuesday in North America and Wednesday for European PS3 users, and includes four love-centric tracks to get you into (or very quickly out of) the mood.

Peep the full track list after the break, and see if you're the kind of person who'd rather be playing Rock Band 3 on Valentine's Day. (Please invite us.)

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Crowded as it is with farting massage simulators, it can be hard to find worthwhile titles on Xbox Live Indie Games. That's why we sift through all that rough to unearth a few gems. That way, you get the skinny on quality games and we get to indulge our secret passion for fart machines. This week, we try out Nyan Cat Adventure, a platformer from 21st Street Games.

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Indie developer 21st Street Games has found a niche: bizarre platformers. Its previous offering, Techno Kitten Adventure, was a visual assault backed by a simple gameplay mechanic, and the studio's latest is no different. The Xbox Live Indie game Nyan Cat Adventure takes the popular internet meme into the realm of single-button arcade gameplay.

But the most surprising thing about Nyan Cat Adventure is the variety I found in such a simple experience. True, the game only uses one button, but what that button does constantly changes throughout the game's main mode of play, dubbed 'Party.'

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Nobody expected Demon's Souls to be the hit it was, least of all Sony, the game's publisher in Japan. When Atlus decided to publish the game in North America, it took a risk -- one that paid off. The duty of publishing the sequel, Dark Souls, would then go to Namco Bandai.

Does Sony regret passing on publishing Demon's Souls in North America? Senior VP Shuhei Yoshida thinks so. He told Game Informer the company passed on the game after seeing an earlier build of the game. "What happened with Demon's Souls was until very late in the game's development, we were not able to play the game through. There were framerate issues and the network was not up and running. We underestimated the quality of the game and to be honest, the media in Japan did the same."

But still, even after a few hours with the final product, Yoshida remarked that he just wasn't able to see the value in the game. "For my personal experience with Demon's Souls, when it was close to final I spent close to two hours playing it and after two hours I was still standing at the beginning at the game. I said, 'This is crap. This is an unbelievably bad game.' So I put it aside." In the end, Yoshida admitted Sony "dropped the ball from a publishing standpoint" and was not able to "see the value of the product."

The Indie Royale website is back at it with a brand new bundle of games for sale, this time scheduled for Valentine's Day. On this one, paying either the minimum price (currently just above $4) or above will net you five different indie titles: The impressive FPS (and IndieCade finalist) Zeno Clash, the excellent and underrated Hoard, the gorgeous adventure title Lume, and top-down puzzle crawler Soulcaster and its sequel. Plus, buyers also get both Hoard DLC packs, and anyone who pays higher than the minimum will pick up the "Music to Play Games by Too" compilation album.

Remember, the way the bundle works is that the price goes up as more people buy the bundle, but it drops when people spend more than the minimum (so giving more actually makes it cheaper for everyone, and supports the game's developers as well). Purchased titles are available on both Steam and Desura, and the bundle is on sale through Valentine's Day.

Square Enix has released another Taito shmup on the App Store, and as with pretty much all Square releases, we can't help but be aghast at the price. Given the source material, however, maybe $11 isn't that bad.

Dariusburst Second Prologue is based on both the PSP Dariusburst and its arcade followup, Another Chronicle -- the two latest iterations of Taito's long-lived shmup series about shooting enormous robot fish. The PSP game content is all here, along with a remixed mode with new enemy patterns and stuff from Another Chronicle. There are also four new tracks by Taito's Zuntata band.

In other words, if it were on PSP, there'd be no question of its value. We admit we're still kind of balking at the App Store price anyway. That's just how the market is on that platform!

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Adam Adamowicz died of cancer yesterday, and while his career may have focused on building digital worlds, his impact can be felt just as intensely in our physical lives. As the concept artist for Fallout 3 and other Bethesda titles, including Skyrim, Adamowicz shaped the reality of some of our favorite video game experiences, regardless of whether the wider world knew his name.

Awesome Robo offers an in-depth, heartfelt glimpse into Adamowicz's work and life, highlighting the hand-drawn process he used to create Fallout 3's vault jumpsuit, weapons and super mutants, among dozens of other integral pieces that made up the game's universe.

This is a weekly column focusing on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity.
Morality systems have become role-playing. Or at least, a significant amount of people have come to believe this. To take one example, this review of The Old Republic is premised on the concept that BioWare's style of moral choices are effective character-building mechanics. It's a fine review, but it's one that I can't agree with because I find the model of game morality used in The Old Republic and many other role-playing games ineffective at creating a moral system.

In order for a moral choice to have weight, it needs to have two components. First, meaningful choices have to cause the player to lose something in order to gain power. Something has to change, or be expected to change, within the game in order for the decision to matter. In Mass Effect, at one point in the game, you have to choose which of two party members to rescue – the other dies. Or, in Fallout: New Vegas, working with Caesar's Legion turns the New California Republic into an enemy, and vice versa.

Second, a moral choice has to be a difficult choice. The old adage "If doing the right thing were easy, everyone would do it" applies here. This is where games usually fail. They can do it with little choices, like with stealing even when you won't get caught in New Vegas. Take the owned items and you'll lose karma, which might be a small hit compared to the benefits of a new weapon. Alternately, in some games, honorable characters will simply refuse payment for quests, forcing money to be acquired by other means.

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Yesterday Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes of Team Meat dropped a gigantic, raw bomb on Twitter (gross), announcing their intent to strip down Super Meat Boy and rebuild it completely for mobile touch devices. They were vague on details apart from an intent to create a brand new game in the Super Meat Boy universe, and that they definitely wouldn't use "shitty touch controls."

We thought they were being coy, but it turns out they don't know much more about the touchscreen version than we do. It's still in the engine phase of development, McMillen told Joystiq, and they're pretty much winging it, playing with things that work and throwing out ideas that don't -- even if that includes the entire game.

"I mean, honestly, this is simply a challenge for us," McMillen said. "It's easy to poo-poo a new system because of its horrible use of touchscreen on ported titles; it's harder to attempt to try and figure out a design that works and make something worth checking out.

"So that's basically what we are doing -- no idea how it will turn out -- but Tommy and I wanted to jump back into dev again with something that isn't going to take a year-plus to make, so prototyping this idea seemed most appropriate and inspired."

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Closure won the third annual Indie Game Challenge at this year's DICE show in Las Vegas. The clever puzzle platformer, which works off the premise that only illuminated objects exist in the game world, has players manipulating lights to solve challenge rooms. The team will receive $100,000 for taking the top prize, sponsored by The Guildhall at SMU, GameStop and the AIAS. The game will be available soon on PSN.

Other category winners included Symphony for technical achievement, The Bridge for achievements in art direction and gameplay, and Nitronic Rush received the "Gamer's Choice Award." The teams receive $2,500 for each category.

Check out all ten of this year's talented nominees by heading over to the Indie Game Challenge site.

Frictional Games, known for the Penumbra series and 2010's fantastically creepy Amnesia: The Dark Descent, is teasing something new. A new website, NextFrictionalGame.com, hosts a blurry image above emblazoned with the Amnesia logo and the cryptic words "Something is emerging." The image also contains a link pointing to a Google map of China. An Amnesia title with a Chinese backdrop? Could be.

The site is indeed registered for Frictional, and the domain information also points to TheDarkSwarm.com -- a possible hint at the new game's title -- which leads to an unplayable browser game and a timer that continuously ticks upward every second. The source code on both sites mention first-person perspective, horror, action adventure and other qualities we've come to associate with Frictional. The Dark Swarm site was registered way back in 2007, and was updated in September of 2011, so it might be unconnected.

Frictional's Thomas Grip told us last year that the studio was working on "an Amnesia-related project." At the time, he said that the project wouldn't focus solely on creating fear, but will hopefully "evoke other, less primitive, emotions as well." If that means it will feature even a few moments without teeth-clenching, panic-stricken fear, we're all for it.

GameStop is building its digital distribution business, having seen a 158 percent growth year-over-year in the third quarter, with strong returns thanks to customers who don't use credit cards.

"70 percent of our sales for DLC is non credit card. So that's a customer either paying with cash, GameStop gift card or trade credit," Steve Nix, manager of PC digital distribution for GameStop told us at DICE 2012. "Think about all those Call of Duty Elite subscriptions and all those customers who aren't using a credit card to purchase them."

"We're actually growing [the downloadable content] market, because about half our DLC customers never purchased DLC previously. So, for game developers that want to sell more DLC, we're introducing gamers to DLC for the first time in our stores."

Nix recognized that it may seem odd the retail chain's brick and mortar stores are so successful selling digital content. It's clearly servicing customers who don't have credit cards or don't want to use credit cards, but still wish to extend their favorite games. He "absolutely" feels this same situation is what's pushing their in-store PC full game sales, despite PC gamers having so many online purchasing options.

Since Gamestop purchased Stardock's Impulse digital distribution store, we wanted to know if it would continue to pursue Goo, which would have essentially created a "used PC games market."

Nixing the idea, he said "We don't see a lot of interest in that model from our publishing partners." He recognizes customers would be interested, but is not really seeing publisher support for such a model.

Game Rating Board, South Korea's premiere games rating board, has listed another entry in the Magic: The Gathering series of games, presumably for the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 again. As things look, Stainless Games and Wizards of the Coast have no plans of stopping the annual installments.

It shouldn't come as much of a surprise: both the original Duels of the Planeswalkers and Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012 performed well, the former having sold over 500,000 copies on XBLA, while the latter was one of PSN's top performers last year. Considering both previous installments launched in the summer, we're betting we'll be hearing about Duels 2013 soon.

You remember Warhorse, right? The studio from Prague that's making that unannounced RPG for those unannounced next-gen consoles? Well it turns out the studio is employing Crytek's third CryEngine iteration for said unnamed project, according to a press release issued by Crytek earlier today.

Warhorse exec producer Martin Klima explained his studio's logic behind employing CryEngine 3 by saying, "We looked at every major technology out there and CryEngine 3 suits our needs perfectly." The Warhorse folks didn't offer any more information about the RPG in production, unfortunately, and we're betting it'll be some time before we hear anything more solid on the seemingly very early in production game. Thankfully we've got these infinite dragons and quests to deal with in Skyrim in the meantime!

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Much like Prince becoming the "Love Symbol" back in better times (the mid-'90s), Namco Bandai Holdings announced plans to spin off its existing internal development teams into a separate company (that is also still totally part of Namco, by the way). The new company will be named "Namco Bandai Studio" and will comprise the the approximately 1,000 employees who are already part of Namco.

The organizational change was spurred by Namco's interest in speedier dev times and tighter cohesion between disparate dev teams. The changeover won't go into effect until April 2, so you've still got at least a month to snag some classic Namco Bandai Holdings collectibles* while you still can!

(*Note: Those don't actually exist. Unless you're a crazy person, of course.)

The Steam forums and database was hacked in November, and Valve is still investigating the breach. In a new note to Steam users, Valve head Gabe Newell announced that "it is probable that the intruders obtained a copy of a backup file with information about Steam transactions between 2004 and 2008." The file contained user names and email addresses, and encrypted billing addresses and credit-card information, but it did not include passwords, Newell said.

So far there has been no evidence that credit cards or billing addresses have been compromised from the attack, but Steam users should pay close attention to their accounts and keep Steam Guard on, Newell said. Read Gabe's full update below, which has been sent to all Steam gamers as well.

Update: The headline previously included the phrases "credit card info" and "at risk," which seemed alarmist to some readers. It has been updated and glasses of warm milk passed around to everyone. Enjoy.

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