If you haven’t heard of Red 5 Studios, don’t feel bad…they haven’t really done anything and who knows if they ever will. Kotaku, citing unnamed sources, is reporting a rumor that the Irvine-based video game studio has laid off the majority of it’s staff, is down to 30 employees, and has abandoned the online MMO it had been working on. (No official info on the MMO was released, but it’s rumored to be a futuristic military shooter.) The company was reportedly close to closure, but was purchased last week by an unnamed buyer, who has the company now focused on a project “aimed at the Chinese market.”

The studio was formed back in 2005 by a bunch of ex-Blizzard employees who’d helped to develop World of Warcraft. They also managed to raise $18.5 million in capital for the company back in 2006, for all the good it did them.

So, basically a studio you never heard of won’t be releasing a game they never told anyone about. I’ll tell you, I’m just trying to hold back my tears on this one.

[Kotaku]

Ever wish you could spend a third of a million bucks on someplace you not only couldn’t live in, but also couldn’t even touch? Well, you could do what one guy did and spend the equivalent of $330,000 on the Entropia Universe MMO’s Crystal Palace space station. What do we mean by “equivalent”? Well, Buzz “Erik” Lightyear spent 3.3 million “Project Entropia Dollars” (or PEDs), which are exchangeable for 10 to a US dollar. So, while he may not have actually spent all those actual dollars, he could’ve exchanged those PEDs for a third of a million bucks instead (minus transaction fees). Now, he gets revenues from every sale on the station, but that’s still a huge chunk of space change.

[OMM via Slashdot]

Hey, remember when people cared about what NASA was doing? Neither do we, but NASA apparently does, as they’re trying to regain some semblance of relevance by releasing a new MMO game, Astronaut: Mars, Moon and Beyond, to suck in potential space cadets.

The game will be set in 2035 and players will help to create settlements throughout the solar system. It’ll use the Unreal engine and a mini-demo game, Moonbase Alpha, should be out early next year. But if this is going to compete for the attention of drug and sex-starved video game plaers…well, they better put a lot of “tang” in it.

[NASA via Game Politics]

If you’re a trekkie waiting for the launch of the Star Trek MMO (and still trying to drink the memories of Star Trek Nemesis out of your brain, like us), you might want to preorder it now, as Cryptic Studios and Atari have revealed that a ton of extra equipment and crewmembers will be available to those who preorder from specific outlets. Oh, and preordering gets you a spot in the open Beta Test, so there that, too.

Some of the exclusive stuff you can get with (along with translations for those of you who aren’t sitting in your Federation jammies):

Best Buy: your own pet. Federation players get a Tribble, while Klingons get a Targ (a Klingon horned space pig).

Gamestop: you get your own Constitution Class starship. (That is, an Original Series Enterprise-style starship.)

Wal-Mart: you get an extra skill points to advance you characters faster.

Amazon: you get your own “liberated borg” bridge officer. (Think Seven of Nine, the corseted, large-breasted cyborg from Star Trek Voyager.) While we don’t know if the character will have her, um, “assets” (space boobs), it will come with unique nanotech abilities.

Target: you get an exclusive weapon, the TR-116. (This is a good old-fashioned projectile shooting rifle with a transporter attached. It was used in a Deep Space Nine by a crazy Vulcan sniper to shoot people in the head through walls. So far, this is the one we’re looking for.)

Direct2Drive: you get a multi-spatial personal shield, which will regenerate and improve the health of your character. (This is the type of the shields the Borg use. If you don’t know them, they’re the cyborgs that took over Star Trek Voyager.)

STEAM: you get chromodynamic armor, which improves the damage and critical hits of energy weapons. (Yeah, we don’t know what the heck this is. Sounds fancy, though.)

[1UP]

MMO’s aren’t my cup of tea. I don’t have the time, patience or money for them. That being said, it looks like DC Universe Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic are trying to suck me in by combining my love of both properties with a strong desire to waste more time. And, yeah, I know the above trailer is old, but it’s still damn cool.

All this is a roundabout way of telling you that Kotaku had two big pieces of information for my fellow fans looking forward to said games. First up, they reported on how to sign up to hopefully-maybe get a chance to play the beta of SW: TOR. You’ve got to sign up for the forums and then you can head to the Game Testing Page to sign up. Again, it’s not guaranteed, but what else are you doing today?

On the DCUO front, Kotaku showed off 18 pictures of Green Arrow images from the game. There’s a great mix of images from the design stages to turnarounds to in-game screens that are all pretty impressive. As a GA fan, it gets me excited for the game. Also, take a second to read the comments in which vid3oman64 calls GA a racist. Now, I know I’m jumping in to aid a ficitonal character here, but nothing could be further from the truth. Green Arrow’s the uber-liberal of the superhero community and everyone knows it. Get your facts straight vid3oman64! Anyway, here’s some pics from Kotaku.