So here I was discussing with my friend Alan about how awesome Magic used to be back in the day. And he makes mention that we could just play Magic: The Gathering Online free of charge using some pre-made decks or something like that. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me. Relive a part of my earlier years for no cost whatsoever other than some hard drive space? Sure, i'll bite.

Fast forward to just now. I finally brought myself to download the client (I was worried that my Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4ghz processor wasn't good enough for the Pentium II 333Mhz requirement and that my 1440x900 monitor would be incapable of displaying 800x600 at 'high color') and I was treated to something most companies never think to do: entertain you while you install. Normally I would be able to blow through an installation pretty quickly, for larger games I would go make myself a sandwich (and I make a tasty roast beef sandwich) but in this case I was treated to a game before I even installed my game!

The name of the game is Magic Online Install/Update Agent. The premise is simple. You are given a cute window featuring this magical dragon and you are asked to choose your install path before clicking the green checkmark of awesomeness to proceed to your game. The interface is also simple, there is a box in the center of the game box that tells you what file it is downloading and what percentage of this file it downloaded. Beneath this you have a status bar that shows you your overall progress made. It begins to install a few files when the game officially beings.

A window pops up informing you that your connection has been lost while it was attempting to download a particular file. It gives you the choice of either Mr. Green Checkmark or the Ghostbusters logo. As much as I love Ghostbusters, I knew this would cancel my installation and I wanted this game installed so I clicked my old friend Green Checkmark. About 10% later, this same window popped up again, but the window with the checkmark had moved. So I moved my mouse over and clicked it, and not but 1% later it came up again, in a new home at the other side of the window. So again, I move my mouse to click it and it goes another percent and the window comes up yet again, but in a new location. I tried hitting enter but it would not accept that as apparently that would be cheating. As the percentage ramped up and up these windows became more frequent to the point where I broke a sweat trying to keep up. Like a demented game of Simon Says, this window continued to move all around.

This game was rather entertaining, and I have to give it to the creators of this fine game for giving me something to do while I was installing their fine piece of software. Some people just give you pretty pictures to look at, others give you a blue background to stare at while a bar moves up. But no, Magic: The Gathering Online has a bonus game in it's installation file. Fuck the casual gaming market with their simple gameplay and 5 really bright colors representing fuck all. Peggle and Bejeweled don't got SHIT on this. Thank you so much for the fun, the last level at 98% to 100% got really difficult and I actually had to give up. I mean, why bother trying that hard when there's no achievement points at the end of the gate, right? (I keed, I keed).

As a post-blog note, it turned out the problem for some reason was the fact I was using a dual core processor and it just doesn't like that. So I set the affinity to one core and it's been chugging along since then.