Playstation Home: Was it worth the wait?
Sony’s new social online experience is now in public beta. You access Home from the XMB where the online options are located. The first thing you will do when you launch Home is create your avatar. Sony’s does a great job with its customization options here as you can customize pretty much everything. Communicating in Home is done mostly with text. You can use voice chat, but the other user has to be at your personal house. Once you finish creating an avatar the first place you will go to will be the Central Plaza. You will have to download the Central Plaza and any other area you want to go to before you go there. Each download takes about a minute or two. You only have to download each area once, after that you can go to and from each area without having to download that area.
The Central Plaza is where you will first see all of the other people that are using Home. At first, they appear as ghostly silhouettes and after a few seconds their avatars will load. The Central Plaza is the main hub to get to the other areas of Home. From here you can get to the Mall, Bowling Alley, and Theatre. Inside the plaza you can play a mini game where you control a flying saucer. It’s a neat way to blow about 2 minutes before you get tired of it. There is also a music square where you can go to and listen to music with other people. There are not a lot of songs to choose from and you have to vote for the next song you want to hear. You will also see a bigscreen TV showing movie and game previews.
The Mall is where you will go to get things for your avatar ranging from clothes to real estate and furniture for your house. Each item costs money ranging from $0.49 for clothes to $4.99 for new houses. Personally, I won’t be spending any money on clothes or houses, but hey a lot of people probably like dressing up their avatar. You will also find some chess tables upstairs and a big TV screen that will show previews of new movies and games.
The Bowling Alley is where the majority of the mini games are, with bowling and pool being the main ones. There is an arcade here to, but most of those games are fillers.
There are 2 game spaces available, one for Uncharted the other for Far Cry 2. These areas are glorified versions of the Central Plaza with new skins on them. Users should expect more game spaces in the future and hopefully something unique about each one besides how it looks.
I think Sony has laid the foundation for something that could be special, but in its current form there is nothing that keeps me coming back for more.
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February 3rd, 2009
Oh no! Some random idiot in the gaming press is running his mouth off!
Meanwhile in the real world the Home servers are completely filled with people having a complete blast playing games together, making freinds, hanging out with existing friends, checking out the game spaces, game companies are rushing to get their own Home spaces online, and Sony is already raking in huge amounts of cash from sales inside of Home.
February 3rd, 2009
Thanks for the comment Nathan. Personally I think Sony’s Home will turn out great eventually, but I was looking at what they had at the start of the open beta not what they might have a few months down the line. I think what EA is doing with their upcoming game space is looking great. As it stands right now, I think that Home just doesn’t have a lot of content available, plus it’s still beta so I’m sure we will see tons of tweaks and upgrades to the service as they listen to the community’s feedback.
January 31st, 2011
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