So I began my Thursday with downloading the open beta to Battlefield 3 and it took roughly two hours to complete. Called a few friends to hop on and do the same after about twenty minutes so they could let it download as well since we were playing/doing other things. Game loaded up and was prompted a few times to accept things and was able to join a match alone pretty quickly. I had previously played the closed beta of BF:3 on my PC and thought the title was very broken, but being a beta, things will more then likely not be solid.

The game ran pretty smoothly for the entire match and I felt DICE had really patched it up well since the previous time I had played. During my match, my friends had finished their downloads and hopped on. Squaded up and fifteen minutes later, we were in a game. This experience was much different then the match I had just played. I was unloading bullets with pretty good accuracy into person after person and getting zero hit markers but making myself stand out on the map and becoming the number one target for my enemies. Thing is though, I died by a single bullet almost every time.

One of my friends gave up and signed off after ranting about how he was "dumping bullets into **** and receiving no kills. About halway into the match the screen went black with some "tips" towards the lower half of the screen and a moving "Loading" icon in the bottom right. I was at this screen for ten minutes before dropping into the dashboard so I could reboot the beta. With the beta loaded, I clicked the Multiplayer option and was prompted with an error after five or so seconds telling me it couldn't connect to the EA servers. Very unfortunate, so I spammed the A button and it let me in. :) My friends were also getting the same error, but used the same method to acheive access into the lobby. We squaded up which took about five minutes and then my console froze. I didn't realize it till about five minutes of silence went by and no-one was replying to me. Manually shut down the console and rebooted to reload the beta. Beta loads and I get an unknown error and I'm unable to move any further. I didn't plan on playing BF:3 all day, but I was bummed.

Since the 360 was having server issues, I decided to turn my PS3 on and download the beta there. I was greeted by a "Maintenance" update when logging into the store, so I hit a dead end.

Turned my PC on to download the beta there and at 15%, I got numerous errors. After multiple tries, I gave up and it never went any further then 15%. PC went off and I decided to give it time.

Around Five in the afternoon I decided to try the 360, more errors. Went to the PS3 and the store was back up so I downloaded and walked away for it to complete. Twenty minutes later and I was ready to install. Install took about three minutes so I loaded up and jumped in. Zero errors and a little bit of lag for two matches until I was kicked and the black screen popped up. Decided to turn it off and call it a day. Going to try back tomorrow and hope things have been worked on a little bit. I see this weekend having a few issues with a flood of kids being able to hop on.

See all of you on the battlefield.

With the Pokemon launch behind me and the laughter I gained from a lengthy day with children screaming because they couldn't get the free character GameStop has had available for download since the 10th of February, I find myself thankful that I am not a fan of the character capturing phenomenon. I understand that people have grown up with the series, but I just figured it would a be a phase. With games like Call of Duty and many others, I would assume people would catch on to things targeted towards them. Pokemon has proven that no matter the age, it will be apart of us forever.

It is now 10:10am here on the West coast of the U.S.A and I havn't been to sleep yet. LOL! Been playing Nazi Zombies on Call of Duty: WaW or what most people call; WaW or COD 5. WaW is not my COD of choice, but Nazi Zombies is fun with friends on Xbox Live. Since I have been spending a lot of time lately on Call of Duty it gets me wanting the need to play COD: Modern Warfare 2 so badly. I have been a huge fan since the first installment and things just keep getting better. I have been investing so much time into reading up on the next title and playing as much of the previous titles as possible to keep whatever skills I have intact. Call of Duty 2 was probably the best thing that has ever happened to with gaming. The people I have met and the amount of fun that has come from the online matches I have played always keep me popping it back into my 360 from time-to-time. All COD 2 lacks is a larger amount of players for online play in my opinion, but Treyarch brought that to life with COD 3. I still wonder why Infinity Ward took a step back and decided to have in most cases only twelve players in the match. I just feel that Infinity Ward let down a lot of people with keeping the populated bodies below sixteen. 24 people seems perfect to me and many people have agreed. Since Treyarch was able to populate 24 bodies, why couldn't they just do an update for COD 4 to make people happy and give the online play even more depth? Well that's all I have to say for now and hopefully I'll have more to think of on this issue.

So I consider myself a PlayStation lover and people would call me a fanboy of the console since I talk so much about PlayStation titles. In reality I own fifteentitles for the PS3 and around 100 titles for the PS2 and about thirty titles for the PSP and a few hundred original Playstation titles. The PSone made me a gamer. It gave birth to a world I never new existed within my foster home life. I remember playing games on the PC, but that wasn't really what I concidered a start of my gaming obsession. My thirteenth birthday came and my grandmother suprised me with a PSone and 5 games. I would like to say that one game made me a gamer and that game happened to be Grand Theft Auto. I had never been so immersed into a world as much as I was with that game. I had basketball, football, a shooter and an rpg at my disposal and yet, GTA was my game of choice. Maybe it had something to do with a way of me getting out supressed anger. I remember being six years of age and playing a Nintendo and remembering how much I loved it. I don't remember the games, but the memory is nice. I remember receiving a Super Nintendo for christmas when I seven years old and a Sega Genesis when I was 10. I played games before the PlayStation, but nothing really pulled me into that realm. The Playstation brand kept me so occupied until the Dreamcast came out and that just blew my mind and I felt from then on I was a Sega follower, until the release of the Playstation 2. Who would of thought? The PS2 was the first console I actually purchased for myself and I think that was the real stepping stone. I waited specifically till the Gran Turismo 3 bundle was released and bought Zone of the Enders right along side of it. Those two titles kept me busy for a while but made my hunger for more games much stronger. After years of loving my PS2, the XBOX was released. I was very skeptical at first, but when I went to a friends house and saw what it was capable of, WOW! I almost felt like trading in my PS2 and getting that beautiful monstrous sized black box. I did the next best thing, I traded in the Dreamcast, lol. I had about 40 tiles and four controllers each sporting a VMU and shock adapter. The bundle got me 500 bucks. Took my money to a Best Buy and made my purchase. The XBOX kept me occupied for a short while, but the PS2 was staring at me day in and day out. Some new games were coming out that weren't available on the XBOX and I decided to make the purchases. The XBOX became a unit I quickly forgot about up until the announcement of the XBOX360. My mind had just been blown. I had known about XBOX Live for a while and it didn't really appeal to me much, but something about the 360 caught my eye and I just needed to have everything it said it could give me. Now, I waited a year to see how the console would do and spent extensive amounts of time at friends to play as much of it as I possibly could. So I made the jump and got one in December thinking that everything would be great. The first six months were amazing with the console. I lived with a friend that owned a 360 as well, so XBOX Live was great playing with friends in the same house. I remember the first time I saw COD: 4, and thought that I needed to play this game at that very moment since I was extensively playing Cod: 2 and 3. Then they announced the Beta. I made sure everyone I knew got a Beta Key so we could rock that game for day's on end. The summer was so great with the Halo 3 beta and Cod 4 beta, that I decided to play only the Cod series to keep my skills in check. The release of Halo 3 dissapointed me because I expected more unfortunately. The release of Cod 4 made me so happy because it was everything I could have hoped for. Four days later my 360 died. Those crazy lights of death. I was without a console for more then five months because I kept receiving a defected console either from overheating or I received it damaged. So I get the console back in working order and I couldn't be more happy. At this point I own 35 titles for the 360 and that was just money sitting around not being used. The biggest upset, more then half my friends decided to delete my from their buddy list. I got over it, but it really bummed me out. I decided to start my daily does of gaming. A little over a year later and I decided it was time to take the plunge, I bought a Playstation 3. The best decision I have made in the year 2009. I purchased the console for one game, Gran Turismo. I love that game so much. It keeps me going back to PlayStation every time. Gran Tursimo Prologue may be the only option I have thus far, but it is a great one. I have to admit I don't turn the PS3 on very often because I am now over a hundred titles deep into the 360 and counting. So am I an XBOX fanboy? Or am I a PlayStation fanboy for wanting a console for a single game title? I respect what both consoles bring to the competition, and I wish each had something to offer what the other lacks, but that is life. I'm just thankful that I hate the Wii. Sorry Nintendo, maybe next time you can make something that doesn't look worse then a Gamecube.