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.
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