Confessions of an addict + decisions

So, just about every other guy i've talked to for the past couple of days have been playing Football manager, or FM 2008. This stirred up a great deal of past bittersweet memories of mine with the game. It tells a tale of a love hate relationship between the game, (then called Championship manager) and myself.

I picked the game up in 2001, during my sec 2 December holidays and started taking my Man Utd. I was such a noob, didn't know anything about managing a team. Still, united was winning without much supervision. It was only during some "sharing session" i had with some of my homies that i discovered that one does not have to take both the first team and the reserve team. That improved my pace on the game by almost 50%. However, the time i spent on the game was unchanged. I wonder why... At my peak i was going at a rate of 1 game season every 2 days. As if it was real, i rejoiced when i won the league, bit my nails as i saw my team trying to overturn a 3-1 first leg deficit, and howled in anguish when my star striker missed from the penalty spot.

Indeed, at that impressionable age, i had problems separating virtual life from real life. When i bought Arjen Robben to my team, i expected to see him on the pitch when i watched United that weekend, and when i sold Gary Neville to wolverhampton for 300,000 pounds, i was genuinely shocked when i saw him skipper the team in the champions league that week. Everything was fuzzy, maybe due to the sleep deprivation i experienced while i told my mother, "five more minutes" at 3 in the morning.

Life went on however, and in my sec 3 year, i was almost retained, and kicked out of MEP because of Championship manager, and A maths. But that is a story altogether. I only got down to studying and practicing because i almost got kicked out of MEP because i spent all my time i had playing that darned game instead of tinkering the ivories. I did start practicing and studying again, because i was genuinely afraid of getting retained. But equally as important a reason, was that my computer crashed.

In retrospect, it was SUCH a blessing from high above. I managed to scrape through my 'O's and by God's grace, get in JC. After that, choir took over my life, so there was no issue from then on.

But now, i stand at the edge of clicking the download link on my torrent software, trembling.

Do i, after so many years, still harbour the same addiction? Will i allow the monster to rear its ugly head again? Will this 500 odd megabytes of text data consume me all over again?

hmmmm...... or have i grown up, maybe i have got the mental discipline to stop my game progress at an hour. Maybe i will be so busy with school and other activities that i wont have time to play a whole season. Or maybe it wont work on my mac at all.

Should i test it?