My initial flirtation with Azeroth was mercifully brief, lasting only the duration of a few blagged free trials and two months of actually paying, but intense, taking in over 60 hours in that time. Thankfully I hit a wall relatively early on and got bored by slow progress, and later managed to avoid temptation when patch 2.3 sped up levelling to get people to the new, high-level content. I was free, and I’ve been two years clean.

You can probably guess where this is going by now…

A couple of weeks ago it hadn’t even entered my mind to play Warcraft again, but a chance discovery that the Burning Crusade expansion was now only £6.99 was all it took. I feel like a drug addict who’s fallen back into the habit upon seeing that smack was on a 2-for-1 offer.

The current plan is to try it out for a month to see if I like what’s changed, and with any luck I’ll be sated after only dropping another £8.99 into Blizzard’s coffers, but you know how these things go. You find a new area with new quests, or manage to gain some new levels and cool items, and before you know it the new expansion is out and what can it hurt to give it a try because it’s only £25…

Oddly, I also got pulled into the Blizzard halo effect and reinstalled Warcraft III and its expansion. After being out for six years, Blizzard finally removed the requirement to play with the CD in the drive, taking away my biggest issue with playing it on a laptop and stripping out my most second-most hated form of copy protection. Why any game with such an online-focused community needs that, I’ll never know, and, at the risk of getting into that copy protection argument again, how about not making me hunt down a no-CD crack for a game that I own and legitimately want to play on my lap without forever ruining my chances of procreation?

Still, it remains a great game after all these years and is much more to my tastes than the epic-scale RTSs du jour like Supreme Commander. It’s even got me convinced to buy Starcraft II on release day so as to get in on the ground floor and only be lightly kicked in the posterior, as opposed to the prison shower scenario that starting on the first Starcraft at this point would bring. Ditto Diablo III.

Microsoft, Sony, and even Nintendo: please bring out something good so that I have no excuse. This enemy is far too powerful for Geometry Wars 2 and Uncharted with trophies to fight it alone.