Play Station Home

A beta of Sony’s virtual environment, Home, is finally available for every Tom, Dick and Harry to download for free to their PlayStation 3.

Way back when the PS3 first hit the shelves Sony was proud to announce an upcoming feature called Home, where users can walk around, interact with friends, own a home, have house parties and meet up in game lobbies.

This all looked fantastic but it was heavily delayed until a closed beta was released a little while ago; and now this beta is available to all, albeit with many features not yet available.

After one final 12-hour delay I downloaded Home – which appears after the latest software update – and began to create my character. I wanted to get going as quick as possible so selected a default avatar, dressed him quite badly, and off I went into a brave new world.

Or so I thought.

Before I complain too much I must say that it all looks really nice, graphics are good and the background is very detailed. An example of this would be the view from your apartment, looking out over a harbour full of boats and a fancy yacht.

But it’s the gameplay that I was most looking forward to; the ability to interact with other players and be completely submersed in a virtual environment.

And to begin with it looked promising. There was a modern apartment to which I presumed I could decorate and add furniture Sims-style; and venturing outside I found many other users – all dressed the same, we’ll get to that in a minute – and several buildings to explore.

These included a cinema, shopping centre and a currently inaccessible monorail station. So I walked around, had a dance with other users to some music that was being played, watching a film trailer in the cinema and played someone at draughts.

This took about half an hour and so far I was quite impressed, but after visiting the shopping centre, I changed my mind. While there are a range of shops selling clothes, furniture, houses and other stuff, the amount of items on sale was tiny and – yes you read that right – on sale…for real money.

While 59p for some jeans in the real world may seem cheap, remember this is virtual – hence everyone is in the same default clothes - and paying 79p for each piece of furniture soon adds up when trying to fill the £3.99 house.

I would much rather see a system where items either became available over time, or by achieving goals – maybe by including more activities to complete in Home itself, or by earning virtual money from the completion of games.

Once over the fact that a tenner wasn’t going to buy me much virtual crap I looked for something else to do and – after raving like a mofo to a PSP advert, and laughing at the overwhelming majority of male characters stalk the females– Home has shown me all it currently has to offer.

I must remind you that Home is firmly in beta stage – apparent by the numerous attempts it takes to login – and much more content will be added over time. This includes a Red Bull Air Race mini game and, presumably, that monorail – wonder where it goes?

Currently, users can interact by typing messages or selecting from a list of default comments, but this list is very short so most conversations involve:

“Hello”
“Where u frm”
“I don’t have a keyboard”

Of course a microphone can be used but no one seems to be doing so – maybe the hot blonde from LA doesn’t want to let on that she’s actually a fat, balding, more-than-middle-aged bloke from Milton Keens.

Another point worth noting is that Home looks different when accessed from America, Europe and Japan accounts, although no extra content is available so it’s probably not worth the bother of learning Japanese or deciphering American slang.

So, is Home a fun way to spend an afternoon?

No, but it does have huge potential to either be a great social space, or become a terribly obvious money-making scheme for Sony.

Time will tell.

Alistair