If you happen to have picked up the Magic: the Gathering Online beta CD-ROM at your local game retailer and haven’t tried it yet, and you have a dialup Internet connection: don’t bother. The pain, the pain. I don’t even know why I wanted to play with it, other than to see what those cheeky little scamps at WotC are up to. Anyway, isn’t Magic a simple, turn-based game in which not very much information has to go over the wire at one time if you’re communicating the game over a network? So why make the install download 200MB when there’s 600MB of stuff sitting there on the disk? Isn’t that stuff good for anything? Whatever. I’m sure the final version will be fine. Then again, so will IRC.