I just ran into what has to be the buggiest piece of software... ever. Bear in mind that I predate DOS games and have had experience getting games to run in Win 3.1 and even Win ME--some of them games that push the limit of the "Minimum Recommended System Requirements". Maybe time has softened old wounds, but nothing in my  memory comes even close to the horror that is Dark and Light. Seriously. Couple all those bugs with the worst "support" I can remember and you get an experience that is simply best forgotten. Or better, best never begun.

I mean, I've been in alpha tests that were smoother and more consistent. Who ever heard of a launcher that breaks when IE 7 is installed? Seriously, what dependency does your license query have that will hang just because a user has installed IE 7? How does an upgrade to IE 7 cause a simple dialog box with "Accept" and "Decline" buttons on it to consume 80% of my CPU capacity indefinitely (or at least, for the 25 minutes I allocated for what-the-heck-let's-see-what-happens time)? Also, what company posts a message to their support forums that says merely "the devs say they have fixed this" and then nothing more for weeks when it remains, obviously, unfixed?

And here's the thing: even once I got it working (on an older machine--that's right, a game where I had to effectively downgrade my system to get it to run), the game is possibly the worst MMO I've ever played. I admit that I didn't play long before wiping the travesty off my network. Still, that's going to leave a lasting worst-case benchmark for some time to come.

It's not just that it'd be an insult to High School students to say that it's as if the quests were written by one. It's not just that the translation into English (I'm guessing from French due to the number of prepositional insertions involved) could have been done better by the junior varsity football team after a particularly boisterous homecoming celebration. It's not just that key marketing features were mentioned enough by quest NPCs to be intrusive (mentioning how "big" the world is that often leaves me wondering what they're compensating for). And it's not even just the most generic recycled noob monsters imaginable (seriously, rats, badgers, and bees, oh my! And I suspect the badgers were a desperate late addition, inserted by scaling the rat and giving it a different label).

It's that when you take all these together with a game offering fairies as a playable race, you just know that you have reached depths of crap that will (hopefully) never be repeated in my lifetime. It's like a bunch of executives sat down around a table and generated a list of "features" that they could create to take advantage of this great new kind of game the kids are all playing these days and then went out and hired the cheapest programmers they could find to design and implement it. Seriously, if I were a programmer on that project, I'd slip that one down the ole memory hole and invent some lie to put on my resume in its place--something more respectable like, say, time in the state penitentiary for koala bear poaching.

To entice people into this crap-pile, the publisher has introduced a "Discovery Mode" where you can play to level 10 for free. That's an indication of desperation, make no mistake. I feel for the (possibly) earnest people who put this thing together, but it has to be acknowledged as one of the bigger wastes of money ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting planet. I'd like to say something snide about it being a French production, but seriously, you'd think that'd be enough punishment on its own.

UPDATE: If for some inexplicable reason you have inflicted D&L on yourself and need something to redeem the entire clone concept, Shamus Young has an interesting post on a Diablo II clone that doesn't suck.