Eight million people can't be wrong. The Burning Crusade launched with a bang, but what if you were stuck on a dial-up connection trying to play the game on launch night? We tasked one reviewer with just that. This, is his story.

The date is Tuesday the 17th of January, the time 10pm and here I am sitting at home playing Spider Solitare and 3D Pinball. There's not a lot in this world that reduce a gamer to playing the games that come with windows. However in my experience, being stuck on a dial-up connection is one of these things, especially if the few games you do play with a passion are MMORPG's or games that focus on online play.

That was exactly my situation, having recently moved house and being stuck on dial-up while the phone company takes their time giving me DSL. But that's another story, the time now is 10:30pm and after getting fed up with only winning two of the countless games of spider solitare I decide to head down to my local EB early. In the scheme of things I'm glad I did, because before too long there was a queue of easily 75 to 100 people waiting to get their hands on this game.



The store I carefully picked out to attend the midnight launch was not in a hugely popular place, it was on the outskirts of Brisbane right here in Australia. So the crowd numbers shocked me quite a bit. During my time in line I heard that stores closer to the city had numbers of anywhere between 200 to 300 people. These same stores that drew large crowds also held competitions and put on free food and drink. Thinking to myself that the caffeine would have been a huge help right about now, I wasn't about to give up my position in line to get the bottle of coca-cola I carelessly left in my car.

Eventually the clock, or in my case my cell phone, ticks over to midnight and I manage to make it into the store and pick up my copy of the game easily and quickily, having already paid for it in full when i pre-ordered. I leave the store at 12:05am, arrive home shortly there after and install it onto my dial-up ridden PC.