Worlds apart

Jane and I strike a post in Blood Elven form

I made a minor detour in London to pick up the first major expansion to World of Warcraft, "The Burning Crusade".

I really enjoy WoW. Ever since I first started playing in Beta, it's had a home on my hard drive. By taking every element of established massively multiplayer gameplay and honing them to perfection, Blizzard have created a game that really does have something for everybody.

The thing that always impresses me most is the design and variety of environments. They appear at first to be simplistic and cartoonish, but that's just the designers' way of coping with a 3D engine designed to run on only mid-spec graphics hardware. Rather than going for the hyper-real look of many of today's graphics-intense console and PC games, they've adopted a look that makes a virtue of the low polygon count to create a robust, smooth, colourful and varied environment.

Unlike other online worlds such as Second Life, the environment is virtually set in stone, with no chance for user-modification. To put it in terms of childhood toys: World of Warcraft's a pre-moulded Tracey Island play set - compared to Second Life's big box of Lego.

But your playset's this huge, and looks this beautiful, who can complain?

My new Draenei hunter visits the Exodar city-ship