HIT AND RUN [Author: Lum the Mad]

As the smoke clears from the bombs EA management dropped on its until yesterday loyal infoserfs, people are sorting out who’s left and who’s not.

Oddly, despite OSI’s brave noises about refocusing on UO, some well-known UO staffers were let go yesterday as well. We’ve confirmed that Lead Interest GM Greg “Eidolon” Chapman was let go, and the rumor mill has Volunteer Coordinator Jack “Kal El” Wood and Designer/ex-Rant Demigod Pete “Adrick” Warner out the door as well. I guess we won’t really know who’s left standing until the rubble is cleared out by rescue teams flown in from Israel (they’re experienced at this sort of thing now).

In any event, if you were wanting to make an MMORPG, this would be the time to do it. Will Create Worlds For Food!

Speaking of creating worlds, Richard Garriott’s no-compete is set to expire Real Soon Now…

Moving on to other self-destructive companies, Verant announced the beginning of moving the filtering of status messages to the server instead of the client. And a thousand planes raiders cried Hosanna…

…and jumping from exploding game companies to the other side of the dot.bomb, Gamespy announced a partnership with RealNetworks, where Real builds the buggy and bloated Gamespy Arcade into its less-and-less-actually-an-audio-player Real System. I had a dream that the only gaming news network left standing was Planetquake. Of course, in the same dream, Gothmog was beating me with his +7 Mac of Disruption and the Mississippi was running red with the blood of the damned…

…and finally, moving back to my own twisted dreams, I’ve agreed to do a semi-regular not-MMOG game review column for Quarter to Three. The first installment, where I tell you not to buy Star Trek: Away Team, should be up later today. Of course, I just gave away the entire point of the column, but go read anyway so that their bandwidth costs will skyrocket, they’ll shut down and I won’t have to write any more columns. Wheee!