Super-sarcastic MMO site Corpnews has a small news item about newly launched MMO Dark & Light which links to a screenshot allegedly summing up the entire title's launch period - the player fighting an, uhm, 'pile of excrement'.

An associated topic on the Corpnews forums has lots more extremely snarky commentary on the game, which has been in development from creators NPCube for at least 3 or 4 years now - there's a recent interview with Lead Designer Stephane Quilichini in which he comments: "Even if its not all finished like we’d like, but we have too much delays so now we have to get it out, its time." Uhoh.

Bizarrely, the NPCube developers relocated to Reunion, "an island and overseas département... of France, located in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar", but part of the European Union, and we note the Wikipedia entry mentions: "Reunion is currently experiencing an epidemic of Chikungunya virus. As of April 6, 2006, 230,000 people have been infected, which amounts to 29% of the population." Wonder if this is related to Quilichini's comment: "So some developers [were] sick, we lost a few weeks with this and we were not ready"? Looks like there _are_ some perils to moving game development to a lush tropical island!

As for the launch comments, some of those singled out by the Corpnews guys are not... wonderful: "Graphics are reasonable. The sound effects are improved, although it's the first time I've heard crickets chirping in a snow storm." The ten-word summing up thread is reasonably tragic, too: "Dissapointed, had high hopes and it didnt even come close"... "Shallow attempt at making an mmorpg of a terrain simulator." Double ouch.