I don't know about you, but if I found a hellgate, my first priority would be to close it. That's what they do in movies. That's what it seems like I spent all my time doing in Oblivion.

So there couldn't be a more fitting name for the terrible online action RPG that has remained open for a year, spitting out abominations like that guy in the picture up there, as well as the terrible game itself. Hellgate: London was a great big middle finger to its players from well before it came out, up through its launch, well into the clumsy patching process, and even as the developer suddenly imploded last summer. It was a textbook example of everything done wrong: PR, design, community relations, post-release support, and even the closing of developer Flagship Studios.

So I can't deny a certain amount of schadenfreude at discovering that one of the companies that held the rights to the game in Asia shut it down last week, and Namco will shut it down in the US on January 31st of next year If there was ever a game that deserved to be put out of its misery, it was Hellgate: London.

There's one thing the publishers at Namco could do to salvage a little good will: find some way to let players download copies of their characters to play in the single player game. Hellgate was created primarily as a multiplayer game so that the developers could rake in an undeserved subscription fee. But it also works as a single player game. I can't imagine anyone actually wanting to keep playing offline, but it would be nice if it was an option for the poor folks who actually got attached to their characters. There are few breaches of trust worse than shutting down a server and killing those characters forever.