I’ve already expressed my disappointment for Battlefield 3 when the beta was launched for it a few weeks ago. My honest opinion of the game was both praised and panned by many people, but I stayed true to my feelings and cancelled my pre-order of the game. To my surprise, I received an email from EA promotions department and was told that due to my horrible treatment I received when I attempted to get my beta code and my low opinion of the game; that I’d be receiving a copy for free. That came today…hard to complain about a free game right?

I received the Xbox 360 version and as I figured, I was met with the typical day 1 title update that all games seem to have these days. No problem, I accepted and the game restarted. I was just about to pick multiplayer mode when I was asked if I wanted to install the “Optional 1.5 GB HD texture pack”

“Optional?!” I thought to myself. More like: “Press the B button to experience the game with shitty visuals or press A button for what you should be playing in the first place.”

There’s a catch to this one too though…See if you don’t have an actual XB360 hard drive attached to your XBOX 360, you can’t install it. It doesn’t matter if your USB stick has 16 GB capacity on it or not. No hard drive, no HD visuals. This means you, Xbox 360 Slim 4GB and Arcade users. Having just updated my review unit to a 4 GB slim, I was slightly pissed off;  but decided to just play it without the HD visuals…I wasn’t impressed; obviously.

My video on the BETA…just in case you missed it.

I tried to join a few multiplayer matches with a friend, unsuccessfully and then we finally settled on trying co-op instead. Sadly, these missions don’t have much excitement to them at all and is definitely something I wouldn’t go out and buy the game for. Before we could actually try mission 3, we were booted from the servers and have been unable to connect to anything online related to the game since.

You would think that EA and DICE would have done a beta test or something to stress test the servers before the final release…Oh wait…THEY DID!

Free game or not, my experience with Battlefield 3 has been poor thus far. I’ll give a full review of the game when the time is right and its actually working, but what a let down for gamers out there.

I stopped by the gas station on the way back from lunch today to pick up a drink and sitting along with the rest of its diabetes spreading brothers  was a Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 edition of Mountain Dew. Yes, joining the likes of Halo and Warcraft, Call of Duty adds its names to the ranks of the Game Fuel tag. How does it taste? Good question, I haven’t tried mine yet; but it is really dark green. Neat eh?

I thought it was time I protected my old Nintendo Power magazines, as I’m sure being down in a basement isn’t helping those printed pages at all. You have to love these old school covers…

Pinball Expo is this week and just like last year I’ll be covering it on my YouTube Channel. To celebrate the event, I will be doing a video on my the latest addition to the game room; my F-14 Tomcat Pinball machine. The video will be uploaded late Friday night!

Boy…do I feel stupid.

I recently pulled out the manual to my Bally Black Pyramid Pinball machine to take a look at a the reward settings on the machine and to set the game on its default 3 ball per game setting. After figuring out what I needed to do, I took a look briefly at some troubleshooting diagrams just for the heck of it. If there ever was a chance for a life sized “!” and “?” to appear over my head Metal Gear Solid style, this was it. The manual said this “During sound module testing, make sure that each target plays its accompanying sound.” Accompanying sound? What the hell was it talking about? The machine just makes chimes noises…right? Well after doing some poking around, it seems that sound effects are actually an option on the game and you can turn them on and off.

In order to change the sound setting, you must first power up the machine, open the coin door, hit the test button a few times so the #1 test option comes up and continue to hit the test button to option #18. Change sub option 1 to 3 and you now have all the crazy sound effects that the game should be playing. Maybe the previous owner thought the sounds were annoying? Who knows, but I enjoy them. I feel like an ass for having it for over a year now and not knowing it had sound effects, but it just put some new life into the machine for me.

I do this every year to myself, but usually I wait till later in the year. After effectively picking up Mega Man X2 and Mega Man X3 today and completing the domestic X series releases, its time to call it quits on the game collecting. Now this is never a permanent thing and if I see a piece of gold come my way then I usually pick it up, but this retro game ban usually runs till the Midwest Gaming Classic in March. The Midwest Gaming Classic is the Wrestlemania of retro games essentially and if there’s anyway to come back to picking up retro games after a break its at this event!

I’ll still be picking up modern games through the rest of the year, like Gears, Battlefield and Call of Duty, but that extra $$$ is nice to have around during the Holiday season!