When Home was first announced, Sony had built up a lot of hype for this service.  First of all, it’s absolutely free and it provided a full 3-D interactive experience to online gaming.  Also, did I mention it was free?  However, after the long delay, it seemed that Home’s momentum has slowed down.  It has definitely lost its steam that it gained a couple years ago.  Plus, with the recent release of the new Xbox experience, will Home provide the revolutionary gaming experience that Sony promised?

So what is PlayStation Home?  Home is essentially a virtual online 3-D space that allows you to meet up and socialize with other PS3 users.  You can chat, dance, flirt, and also play games with them.  It’s basically the Sims meet Second Life, in which you create a personal avatar to traverse through the virtual realm.  Like Second Life, Home also serves as a breeding ground for advertisements.  Everywhere you go, there are large monitors that constantly loops movie and video game trailers.  There’s even a movie theater that you can enter just to watch game trailers.  Since its a free service, I suppose this is how Sony had to find some way to make money back.

Starting Home, you are immediately introduced to create an avatar.  The avatar creation tool is much more robust than the Xbox 360’s, but I’m not convinced if that it’s a good thing.  For a beginner, Home provides so many options that it can be quite intimidating for a non-core player.  Just customizing the face alone has hundreds of possibilities if you factor things like cheeks, forehead, and chin structures.  On top of that, all of these features can be adjusted with a grid that allows you to adjust the dimensions of your head.  Call me lazy, but it got to the point where I stopped caring and just picked a preset character model.
After creating a character, you’re placed in your very own apartment.  The idea of the apartment is that it allows you to completely customize and decorate it with your own personal tastes.  What’s cool is that if you earned any game trophies, they will appear in your apartment as a tangible item.  It’s basically added bragging rights to show your friends how big of a p*nis you have.  So far, in my apartment, I have a couple couches, lamps, and chairs… that’s about it.  Apparently I don’t have much to brag about.  Too bad there’s no way to tape 3 cardboard boxes tapped together to make as my coffee table.

There’s only so much fun in rearranging an apartment that has nothing, so let’s take a step outside.  The first thing you’ll notice when you enter a new area is the downloading time.  Luckily, each areas are relatively small and only takes about 5-10 minutes to download.  The only notable places to visit so far are the Sony Mall and Bowling Alley.  The mall is neat since you can buy things like additional clothes and furniture for your avatar.  Currently, all of the items are free, but I suspect that Sony will start charging real money for these items in the near future.  There’s actually more things to do in the bowling alley as it allows you to interact and play with other people.  So far, you can bowl, shoot pool, and play the arcades.  The bowling and billiards mini-games are fairly entertaining as they’re very similar to what you see in Grand Theft Auto 4, except you’re playing with real people.  The arcades on the other hand is a completely solo experience.  When you approach the machine and hit play, the arcade screen zooms up to full screen and allows you to play absolutely free.  The only arcade games available are Ice Breaker, Echochrome, and Carriage Return.  My main gripe about the bowling alley is that if it’s too crowded, these games can get occupied so you’ll have to wait until it’s available until it’s your turn.

I definitely commend Sony for taking the outstanding effort to add this service to the Playstation experience.  However, I don’t see Home being very useful at all.  Sure, the first few minutes of walking around is fun just to see what Home has to offer.  But like most people, I mainly turn on my PS3 to play games.  While walking around in Home, I can’t help but think that I could be playing an actual game right now.  Even though Home is nearing its release, it still feels very sterile and empty and it doesn’t seem to enhance anything.  Quite frankly, after visiting the bowling alley and mall, there’s really not much to do.  Let’s hope that Sony adds more features when it releases Home in the next few weeks.

Tags: , ,