Friday, May 22, 2009

Game Diary - May 21, 2009: Home Alone (Part 1)


Earlier this evening I fired up the PS3 to check out PlayStation Home. I have looked into the service once when I first got my PS3 but back then it had only just released (into Beta) and therefore was a little bare in terms of content.

I returned this evening due to the recent release of the Chamber apartment as I was interested in comparing it to the Harbour Studio one everyone begins with, as well as seeing the newly added spaces such as game-specific ones for Far Cry 2 and Resident Evil 5. Unfortunately I was unable to see the Chamber apartment as either I'm blind and couldn't find how to access it or it's only available in certain countries.

After redownloading the various spaces again, I finally started to mess around with Home to see what I thought and well, like my previous session, I felt like a complete outsider. I mean, part of Home's appeal is to socialise with people but no one that I encountered was doing any talking aside from the brief "Hello, where are you from?". Beyond that everyone was just walking around aimlessly or dancing randomly. I watched a few trailers, an in-Home presentation with the people behind the latest Star Trek movie and played around with the various activities you could do such as Helicopter Hit and Draughts. All of them felt like novelties -- entertaining for the first 10 minutes but beyond that just there for the sake of being there. That's a little disappointing because I believe Home has some great potential and I would like to see Sony implement that in this service.

Due to the aforementioned redownloading of everything, I didn't get the chance to check out the game or company specific areas so I will do be doing that over the weekend. I also organised to experience Home with a friend, so it will be interesting to see if having that social element (even if only mildly) changes the experience and makes it more compelling. Stay tuned for more on Home soon.

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