I’m always bemoaning my lack of time to play games and I’m not alone.

During the week between office hours, relationships and that pesky reliance on food, I have found myself available to play only for a couple of hours after 10pm. Like any person working a five day office week, my weekends fill quicker than my Sky+ box (I really must start watching the new series of Heroes). My current online flavour of the month is a few GTA Races with Newcode which invariably see me hitting the sack after 1am.

It wasn’t until the end of this week I realised I had all the time in the world - it’s just a matter of foresight.

As a gaming experiment in researching first experiences with MMOs, I spent several evenings this week preparing to try out Guild Wars. I have a powerful behemoth of a PC that I built myself back in 2004 that I haven’t used since I bought an Apple laptop two years ago. I spent two precious evenings decimating the recently clean spare room, dusting off the pimped case, getting it all hooked up and a third evening simply downloading and configuring a Play NC GW account. When I finally ended up running the game, it was barely playable - the graphics card on the PC has apparently aged quicker than Kylie (no really, the woman has just turned 40).

What was my response to this gaming time set back? Go back to GTA IV? No, nothing that sensible. My response was to partition my Apple laptop, install a native Windows XP OS alongside Mac OS X and install all of Guild Wars again.

Bemoan the lack of time to play games?! I’ve spent less time asleep this week than I have setting up this experiment and I’m catching a flight to Scotland in eight hours to go rock climbing…

I wonder if Newcode fancies a Mr. Tasty race?