This evening I've been trawling through the "Your games here" category on this forum, and I've noticed something really tragic:

  Approximately 25%-40% of the non-trivial games crash the computer or just plain don't work at all

The ones that crash the JVM (and frequently my otherwise stable PC too) are nearly always those with "launchers" or "JVM auto-detection", or "detect java plugin automatically" etc etc.

The ones that don't work usually haven't been tested on the Sun JVM (e.g. they only used the MS JVM), or are compiled to an EXE only, or something similar - something that fairly obviously is a failure waiting to happen, even if it seems to work on their own machine.

PLEASE, if you're writing a game, do NOT try and re-produce webstart's features in a half-arsed manner. Webstart has had it's major problems, and appears to have sucked up quite a lot of man-months of effort put into it by Sun - unless you're willing to spend just as much effort making your hack work, just don't do it all, OK?

(I'm also pretty annoyed by the number of games which instead of having a link to download or play have a link to a PHP page which then may or may not (depending on the skills of the PHP programmer and modulo any screwy auto-detection crud) allow you to be redirected to a page where you *can* play the game. But this is just personal preference ( I don't like games that refuse to be bookmarked, and which I can't email a link to to my friends); the crashing issue is actually serious: something that can help put people off java games completely)