So Black Friday for me was kind of big, as this was one of the first Black Fridays that I actually wanted to buy some stuff so I kind of splurged a little bit...
I picked up a $49 LG Blu-ray Player, a $129 Sony Point and Shoot Camera both from Walmart, two PS3 Video Games, Assassin's Creed Revelations, and Batman Arkham City both from Amazon for $35 and $28 respectively. My Biggest purchases would have to have been two Beats Studio by Dr. Dre headphones in both white and black that I was able to get a great price for, $199, only because my cousin in the Air Force told me about a sale the Exchange (their military store) was having on them and I was able to scoop them up for a great price.
So overall didn't do that bad, the only thing I didn't get that I really wanted was a bigger TV for my room, but that's no big deal. Also I didn't encounter very long lines, or hostile people. Most people I met were generally quite nice. So this Black Friday was a also a good experience and it was the longest I've stayed up ever....about 28 hours which is nothing to some people.
Check out all the unboxings of these items plus reviews and hands-on of some of them on my YouTube channel.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Update: Season of Gaming
About three weeks ago I wrote about how I got Battlefield 3 for the PS3 for $8.46 due to pricing errors on Kmart's website, and this is just a little update about that. If you haven't already read it, read it first HERE.
In that post you would recall that I stated only Battlefield 3 went through while all my other orders were seemingly cancelled. To me just getting Battlefield for such as low price was great, and wasn't really expecting them to ship anyways, and kind of just forgot about that. Well then comes last week where I get an email, from Kmart that says they cancelled my order of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 because they were unable to fulfill my order because there was something wrong with my information and left a number to call to get everything straightened out. So I call the number being optimistic and get a really nice lady, who was amazed about the prices I was able to get the game, but even she was unable to figure out why my order was cancelled. So using my smooth negation skills, I ask her if there's anyway I can get the order to go through and she tells me to order the game and that she would submit a price adjustment for $50 some dollars so I do as she says being optimistic that I would get it. Well that was the Saturday before MW3 was released and by the time the game actually was released I still hadn't received an email for a shipping confirmation, so I call them again and they tell me that they don't know why it hadn't shipped yet but assure me that they would pass along the information to some higher and I should get an email or some type of contact within the next 24 hours.
So 24 hours past and nothing, so I call again, and the person this time told me the last associate was wrong about the time frame and that the time frame is 24-48 hours and assured me that someone was going to take care of it. This was Thursday, two days after the release of the game. The next day I waited patiently for some sort of contact and I got nothing. So I pick up the phone and call them once again and this time the associate I got was a complete jackass. He told me that my order hadn't shipped yet because they didn't have any in their warehouse in which he told me was because the game was still new and no one has it yet. He told me that if I were to go to a store they wouldn't have it either. At this point I was irate and called him an idiot and asked to talk to a supervisor and after about 15min of his stalling and being put on hold, I finally reached the supervisor, and she tells me the item is indeed out of stock, but at the same time I was on the Kmart website and there was another copy of MW3 but it was different from the version I had order a few days earlier. It had a different display art and the product numbers were off by one digit. I asked the supervisor about this and she tells me that the one I order which had a product number with a W was from Kmart themselves while the other which had a product number with a V was from a vendor, and that was actually in stock. I questioned the supervisor about this, because there was nothing on the website that said that vendors sold items as well. Well about 15min later of frustration I was able to convince her to let me reorder the one that was in stock, which she originally claimed she couldn't do because they were two different sellers, and still get the price adjustment on the new order. So I finally payed and everything and said goodbye and was hopefully, as it was 11-11-11.
To my excitement I get the shipping confirmation on my order and it was to be delivered today, 11-16, and I did get it today and to my surprise when I opened the packaging I had received MW3 for the XBOX360, not the PS3 version. At this point I was pretty upset that they could make a mistake like this, but I do have a Kmart in my town so I go up to Kmart thinking that they would just exchange the game for the correct system, well it wasn't that easy. The lady at the customer service desk said that the packing slip which was the only thing I got in the packaging was not good enough and asked me if I had a receipt because there was no way they could pull the order up in their system without one. At this point I was frustrated, unfortunately I took a bit of it out on the lady, but I did apologize afterwards. So the lady calls Kmart corporate support or something, and even her call was outsourced and she kept making jokes about it to me. The lady eventually hangs up and just makes the exchange by forcing a return through the system, which I don't get why she didn't do that in the first place, but nonetheless I walk out with the correct game....30min later!
Well to some it all up, I had spent a good 2-3 hours on the phone with Kmart support, calling them basically every day last week, and spent another 30min at my local Kmart to correct their mistake. so much hassle to save $50 on a video game that I had to wait a week after release to get. Would I do it again.....of course! Saving every bit of money helps in the long run. My final cost of the game was $10.59. So between Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, I saved over $100 which is great!
So 24 hours past and nothing, so I call again, and the person this time told me the last associate was wrong about the time frame and that the time frame is 24-48 hours and assured me that someone was going to take care of it. This was Thursday, two days after the release of the game. The next day I waited patiently for some sort of contact and I got nothing. So I pick up the phone and call them once again and this time the associate I got was a complete jackass. He told me that my order hadn't shipped yet because they didn't have any in their warehouse in which he told me was because the game was still new and no one has it yet. He told me that if I were to go to a store they wouldn't have it either. At this point I was irate and called him an idiot and asked to talk to a supervisor and after about 15min of his stalling and being put on hold, I finally reached the supervisor, and she tells me the item is indeed out of stock, but at the same time I was on the Kmart website and there was another copy of MW3 but it was different from the version I had order a few days earlier. It had a different display art and the product numbers were off by one digit. I asked the supervisor about this and she tells me that the one I order which had a product number with a W was from Kmart themselves while the other which had a product number with a V was from a vendor, and that was actually in stock. I questioned the supervisor about this, because there was nothing on the website that said that vendors sold items as well. Well about 15min later of frustration I was able to convince her to let me reorder the one that was in stock, which she originally claimed she couldn't do because they were two different sellers, and still get the price adjustment on the new order. So I finally payed and everything and said goodbye and was hopefully, as it was 11-11-11.
To my excitement I get the shipping confirmation on my order and it was to be delivered today, 11-16, and I did get it today and to my surprise when I opened the packaging I had received MW3 for the XBOX360, not the PS3 version. At this point I was pretty upset that they could make a mistake like this, but I do have a Kmart in my town so I go up to Kmart thinking that they would just exchange the game for the correct system, well it wasn't that easy. The lady at the customer service desk said that the packing slip which was the only thing I got in the packaging was not good enough and asked me if I had a receipt because there was no way they could pull the order up in their system without one. At this point I was frustrated, unfortunately I took a bit of it out on the lady, but I did apologize afterwards. So the lady calls Kmart corporate support or something, and even her call was outsourced and she kept making jokes about it to me. The lady eventually hangs up and just makes the exchange by forcing a return through the system, which I don't get why she didn't do that in the first place, but nonetheless I walk out with the correct game....30min later!
Well to some it all up, I had spent a good 2-3 hours on the phone with Kmart support, calling them basically every day last week, and spent another 30min at my local Kmart to correct their mistake. so much hassle to save $50 on a video game that I had to wait a week after release to get. Would I do it again.....of course! Saving every bit of money helps in the long run. My final cost of the game was $10.59. So between Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, I saved over $100 which is great!
Monday, October 31, 2011
Battlefield 3 First Impressions
Campaign: The very first thing I did when I popped the game into my system was jump into the single player. I've never had a Battlefield game before, but I played it on Hard nonetheless. The first thing that really jumped out on me was that the Campaign was really easy. It wasn't hard at all. I would probably compare Battlefield's Hard to Medium...but that just might be me. The hard part about playing on hard is trying to avoid the enemies as they tend to just gun for you as your teammates just stand there and provided cover fire without actually hitting any enemies, and one or two shots and you're dead. The campaign was also short, I was able to finish it in under 7 hours. During the campaign you play as several different characters with the main character reliving all the these different parts in flashbacks. The story is the main character, whose name slips my mind at the moment, is being interrogated by two government officials about his involvement in the current WMD attacks on several cities, and as they ask questions you relive the missions. There's nothing really too special about the single player, in all honestly I don't really remember the story all that much because there was nothing that "wowed me" or anything like that. The one memorable part of the campaign is when you fly in a jet as you take control of the weapons of the jet. It helped my live my fantasy of flying a jet....even though you're not actually flying it. All in all if I had to give this game a score based primaly on the campaign I would have to give it an 6/10. Let's face it though no one is getting this game solely on the campaign as it's all about the multiplayer.
Multiplayer: The first thing I want to note is that if you played the beta and experienced all those problems, I'm happy to say most if not all of them are gone from the retail version. One thing I want to say about the online multiplayer is that it's really slow, but I guess I'm a little bias as I'm comparing it to the Call of Duty series which is more fast paced. Nothing against Battlefield as that's what makes it different. It took me a little while to get into the multiplayer but now I'm pretty hooked. It's not really because it's that great online, because there are still a lot of problems online, it's because I'm not all that good at it yet. There is also a major influence on teamwork as there are four different classes to chose from in which you can either heal/revive your teammates, provide ammo to your teammates, anti-vehicle class-which comes equipped with RPGs-and then you have the sniping class where you can put down a respawn beacon where you and your teammates can respawn from. You also can call out to you're teammates, even if you don't have a mic, by pressing select (or back with xbox360) to ask for ammo/health. You can also press select to call out enemies and enemy vehicles to your teammates and their locations will show up on the mini map. I really like doing this as I tend to snipe and when I can't get someone I just call them out and let my teammates try and deal with them, and you get points for doing so. I'm still playing the multiplayer and trying to get better and well update this the more I play. I have yet to try the co-op but will try to in the next couple of days.
Thanks for reading! Peace!
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
The Season of Gaming
So with last week's release of Batman: Arkham City, that officially started the fall gaming season. With such high profile releases coming up week after week, this is where the consumers are going to decide which games to buy. To put this in perspective, Battlefield 3 has been released today, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception coming out next Tuesday 11/1 and then Modern Warfare 3 the next week 11/8 and then Assassin's Creed Revelations the next week 11/15. If you were to buy all of these games including the newest iteration of Batman that would put you up to over $300 but everyone is different so some will get to play all these great games and others won't or at least not at the very begging. I had skipped Batman: Arkham City last week so I could afford to play the other great games this season, with the plan of getting it sometime in the near future, where hopefully the price will be a little lower. I would have skipped Battlefield 3 as well as I have never really gotten into the series and putting down $60 for a new game isn't for me but thanks to a Kmart's blunder on their website now I don't have to. Let me explain last Saturday, 10/21, I read a post on www.slickdeals.net that said that Kmart's website had some pricing errors where all their electronics including video games were heavily discounted about $50. This is what my Battlefield 3 order looked like....- Total$59.99
- Tax$0.42
- Savings Applied-$57.00
- Shipping Charge$0.99
- Shipping Tax$0.06
- Total$8.46
So knowing that the orders would more than likely get cancelled as soon as the see the mistake I optimistically ordered Battlefield 3 and three other preorders, with a total of about $26 for all four games. I got all the order confirmations instantly and still optimistic I just left it alone as I knew they were going to get cancelled or they were going to charge me without shipping the games but I knew Paypal would have me covered either way. A day later I didn't get any emails about order cancellations so I remained hopeful, until I just checked my order page via Kmart's website and I saw three out of the four orders cancelled with Battlefield 3 still processing. Thinking it was just a matter of time before it was going to get cancelled as well I left the page, never to think about it again....then last night I received an email that my order had been shipped! I don't remember ever being so excited before. I just got the steal of the year! $50 for a new game is considered a deal, so what does that make ~$9 for a new game? Either way I'm happy and thankful for Kmart's blunder and also respected how they still honored at least one order.
So I'm just playing the waiting game until tomorrow when the game is supposed to arrive via ups. It was rather unexpected to say the very least but you cannot beat the price I beat especially for a high profile release, and with playing the beta at the beginning of this month I have some pretty high hopes, for the game, and look forward to playing it. Getting this game starts the season of gaming for me, and should tie me over until Uncharted 3 next week. Look for probably an unboxing video of the game sometime tomorrow on my YouTube, and also look for my first impressions of Battlefield 3 in this blog.
Friday, October 7, 2011
NBA 2K12 First Impressions for PS3
I don't know about you guys out there, but I've been a huge 2K fan ever since the "ESPN 2K5" version was released way back when, and I eagerly waited for this year's version as them seems like the most NBA action your going to get this year. First off this year's game comes in three different covers, that feature either Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, or Michael Jordan, with the Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird version being limited, I believe. Aside from the covers all the games are identical to one another. When the game first starts you're treated to a pretty cool intro with a mixture of past NBA Legends, and the current generation stars, and the first thing you notice is the graphical improvements over the previous game, 2K11. It's not a huge improvement but it's there you and can you really see it. Also the player's shot animations have also improved, giving it a more natural and fluid motion. The first thing you're going to have to do is create an account for the new 2K sports website. The next thing you notice is the new improved and simplified home screen. It's in a panel design where every panel represents, "My Player" "Association" "Online Association" etc. where one click on the panel will instantly load up that game mode. You can also access more options with the flick of the right thumbstick. I've only played the game a handful of times, where I've joined an online association, played a team up game, and started toward my hall of fame run in my player and all in all I'm pretty satisfied with this year's game. I have yet to try out the new Legendary Challenges-where you take control of some legendary players trying to recreate great movements in NBA history-or the Legends mode-where it's like the My Player mode, but instead of a creating your player from scratch you can control one of the legends or current player and take them through their career. All the other game modes work as they should have worked in earlier iterations of the game, but My Player has really changed this year. In previous games you had to go through the whole combine, which included playing several games before even being drafted. In 2K12 you play one game before the draft, so you gotta make it count. This is a big plus to, as playing game after game in the combine, and when trying out for teams got old, fast. After you complete your tryout game as you will you are interviewed by teams that are interested in you based on your performance, and their interest in you can either increase or decrease based on your answers. All in all I don't have too many complaints, and I see why IGN and other review websites gave it such high marks. My only real complaint so far is that this game is much harder then any of the other games before it. There have been times where I've gotten really frustrated and quit the game and had to leave the room, and I'm not just some newb that doesn't know how to play either, I'm pretty good. This in a way is more of a challenge than it is a complaint. It's just something that myself and other players are going to have to get use to. I'll probably write a short review or something later on as I get a chance to play more of this game, until then, cheers!
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Thanks For Checking Out My Blog
Thanks for checking out my Blog, more content will me added in the future, keep a look out. This is where I'll be saying my product impressions, and what not, so stayed tune.
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