The Battlefield: 1943 release was one that was widely anticipated and it was expected to sell well on XBLIVE and PSN. The game launched on the 8th for Xbox and the 9th for PS3 but all has not been smooth for at least one of the systems.

Since its launch, the XBLIVE version has been marred by issues with the servers. First it happened in Europe where packet loss caused massive amounts of lag when the game first launched there. When it came to North America later in the day it was hoped the problems would be gone or at least not affect gamers here. Not so much I'm afraid.

The demand was too great and there were not enough servers so gamers could not even connect to play. This is essential when you launch an online-only game. In addition to not enough capacity, the servers were also not recognizing purchases of the game causing people to download and install multiple times to no avail. Just this morning more servers were added but that was after taking the whole system down which is unacceptable for the second day after a launch.

The lack of foresight on EA, DICE and Microsoft's part is striking and disturbing. After hyping the game and selling it on the high end for arcade games ($15) you would think they would have all their ducks in a row. Sadly they dropped the ball and thousands of gamers were left in the dark because DICE proved as bad at communication as they were in smooth game launches.

Fortunately, for PlayStation gamers, there appears to be no issues and I can report that I have been playing with no problems on PSN.

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