As you may have heard, Dr Pepper is doing a tie-in promo with EA to offer special in-game content when you enter the codes from bottle caps on their website.  They made the announcement over a week ago, and I have been eagerly examining Dr. Pepper bottles ever since then, waiting to find an EA bottle.

I finally found one yesterday at the little store here in town.  Although they carry several Dr. Pepper varieties, only the Diet Dr. Pepper had been replenished with the EA version.  Which is good, because that's the only one I can bring myself to drink.  (Have you seen the calories in a bottle of Dr. Pepper lately?  Whoa!)

If you successfully hunt down a Sims 3 Dr. Pepper the first thing you will notice is that everything between opening your soda and downloading your custom content is a giant pain in the butt.  I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and say that there are some traffic issues due to the early excitement of the promotion.  Loading up each page on the Dr. Pepper website is a slow torture, and you end up having to enter your password at least three times (including your login for the Dr. Pepper website itself).  

Once you select your game and platform (EA is also offering custom content for Spore, Mass Effect 2, Battlefield Heroes, and a few other games) you get to choose which item to download.  It seems that each cap gets you a single item.  I had been hoping they might have a storefront kind of interface, with different items costing a different number of points.  Save up enough bottle caps and get something really cool, you know?

This promotion will be running through the end of the year, so I assume there will be more items added as time and interest permits.  Currently you have the option of selecting one of about a dozen items, none of which are particularly earthshaking.  Several of the items like the Lagomorph Clock were actually available as free items from the Sims 3 store at one point.

For my first bottle cap I chose Pepper's Party Boots, which are pretty spiffy.  As far as I can tell, these are the only knee-high high heeled boots available for the game, so that definitely counts as "exclusive."  For my second bottle cap I chose the Lips of Loveseat, which (if memory serves) was one of the most expensive couches in The Sims 1.  (I don't remember if it was in The Sims 2 or not.)

PROTIP: when the Sims 3 game launcher stalls, as it did for me both times, you can get back to the item download by going to:

The Store -> My Account -> Purchase History -> Click to download again

In both cases I had to close the Game Launcher by opening Task Manager and killing the process there.  I then found I had mysteriously been logged out of the Sims 3 store, and had to log back in.  I had to try downloading the Lips of Loveseat twice, and the high heeled boots three times.  

Sigh.  I mean, they're neat items?  But sigh.