HOME first impressions and review by Thorzilla

[Thorzilla]

Recently, I've been given a chance to participate in this closed beta about to become open beta for eveyone's joy. This feature has been delayed several times, and has had an overdue launch for more than a year. Want to find out what the whole buzz is about? Read on!

What is Home? Many people seem to have a general misconception about what Home is. To clarify, it's not a game. It may look like a game, but it's not. It doesn't have trophies, doesn't have shootings, doesn't have life points or mana. It's not even listed in the Game section under the XMB but in the Network one. Then, what is Home? In short, Home is the PSN. Not only you can hook up with new people from all over the world, but you can play games like pool or bowling with them. We are also given the chance to watch the latest trailers from the latest videogames and movies. Home also features a couple (unopened) stores that will allow us to purchase anything from clothes to new rooms, or so it seems. To sum it all, it's a PSN virtual world.


Going Home. The download was a very small 77MB file which really surprised me that it would be that small. As soon as I installed it, Home asked me to reserve around 3G of drive space which made me wonder. To my surprise, every place I entered had to be downloaded once to my drive, although the download can be done in the background. It's a nice feature to soothe the wait, but it's deffinitely a small turn off but completely understandable from the point of view of comfort. Developers will probably find it easier to update section by section, which only benefits us users in the long run, as we will have to load only a part of Home, not the full feature once again.

Customization. As soon as we enter Home, we are given the chance to fully customize our avatar. Those familiar with The Sims 2 will feel Home. This customization can be done in two ways. The short way, we will be choosing our clothing like shirts, pants, accessories, shoes, hats and a pre-made face, while those feeling a bit more adventurous will customize their avatar features like weight, height and face. Choosing clothes is easy enough; however, customizing your avatar's features is missing something. Sure, it's a beta, and it's not necessarily the final product, but it needs some tweaking. Besides the fact that some of the tools to customize your avatar feel "half full", those that are there don't feel easy to use. Sure enough, it's easy to manipulate your face's features with the left and right analogue, but it doesn't seem properly organized. You will find yourself rotating your avatar back and forth, asking yourself "What did that do?" or "What does this do?" although the description of the tool is there. The idea is deffinitely there, but in the practice, it doesn't seem too user friendly. That aside, we are given the choice to add very tiny little details like front wrinkles, mouth wrinkles and even freckles which really adds up to the customization.

Once we are done with our avatar, we are taken to our room, with an astounding setting. Our default room feels simple, clean and "chick" and has a very nice balcony with a great view of the harbor below. As well as with our avatar, we can fully customize our room, even giving us the chance to change the wall's color and art. Although we can't seem to have many different items in the beta, there will be many more available after Home is released. The customizing tool has some good ideas, but as it happens with the avatar customization, it's just not completely there. For freaks of having everything perfectly lined up like me, they will find one hell of a hard time rotating items trying to get them in the perfect paralel position. This is a feature that needs to be implemented inmediately. Besides that, everything works just fine.


Places to visit. We can do quite a few things in Home, though some of them are closed or not completely functional as for now in the beta stages like the stores. When we step outside, we are taken to a very attractive little park in the middle of what seems to be a mall. There are all kinds of advertisement posters like R2, Riff, GT5P and Warhawk around as well as two screens with different videogame trailers playing. In the middle, there is a small, quiet spot with chess boards under the sound of a calm flow of water from the water chanel. This is our meeting spot, where all of Home places lead to. The shopping mall, the theaters, the bowling and all rooms all lead here.

The shopping mall. What seems to be a link between the Playstation Store and Home is not open yet. Entering a store leads us to a screen with our PSN account and out shopping cart where we will be able to purchase clothing, items for our room and even newer rooms in the future.

The theaters. It works wonders. Videos load quickly and it could perfectly substitute the trailers section in the Playstation Store in the near future. The design of the theater is spot on and really feels like a real theater. There's already a section for sites like Eurogamer and a few movie trailers, but the gaming section was disordered. Posters from different games were portrayed in the entrance to any movie rooms, while the trailer shown had nothing to do with them. The theaters could use some final touch ups, but overall, it works great.

The bowling. Bowling, arcade, pool...what else does Home need to spend a good time with our friends online? Pool plays good. It's simple, but pretty well done and we can play with one of our friends or any complete stranger we meet. Bowling is good; and though I'm not a big fan of the sport myself, I found it fun to play with people. Arcades feature little, fun minigames such as short levels of echochrome and ice breaker that will probably get boring in the long run, but are fun to play every once in a while just to beat your friend's high scores. Again, we also have the usual advertising posters and promotional videos around for us to watch.


The community. Now it gets hotter. Home's comminity is very diverse, ranging from hispanics, to canadian or american. If you get bored, it's because you want to or just because you are completely anti-social. I had the chance to meet a few american people, some english, scottish, french, spanish, mexican and puerto rican people today. Communicating with them with the controller is quite slow if we choose to write a full message for them. We are given the choice to choose a few pre-made messages like "Hello" and "Follow me". We can plug a USB keyboard and type whatever we need to say; or if we feel lazy, a bluetooth headset will do. We can also emphasize what we say with a wide rande of emoticons such as dances, cheers and actions that look amazingly fluid and well done. This doesn't mean that Home is going to be all flowers and gloss. I found out quite a few stalkers and inmature kids running around the place yelling all kinds of obscene, sexually related phrases to the poor female minority around. Something Home will NEED are moderators, just like in a forum. This will help to keep a good level of decency around by temporarily banning these individuals from Home. In general, everyone was very friendly and open, raving in front of the Wipeout trailer TV or playing some pool.

Conclussions. Although Home is far from perfect, it's a product that I feel to be ready to release. Despite the fact that a few features seem missing or that are not that good, like customization options and the lack of ingame soundtracks or any form of musical device we can all dance to, Home is one hell of a feature. It's not a game, but a networking tool that Sony provides us to meet new people with our own interests. I found it very, very fresh and new to be Home. It feels like a mix of PSN, Facebook and Second Life and it feels very right. For everyone doubtful about this, don't worry; no feature like this was big from one day to another. Soon, Home will grow and we will be able to enjoy what the true Home experience feels like.


I would like to give a big thanks to my man snowhawk who provided me with this new feature in the PSN world by sharing.

[Lethalmind]

I love the review because it's honest. Detailed explanation and very fair.

I'd +Rep you, but I did like a day ago

[scottscorpion]

sounds awesome....know when us minions will get it?
sony doesnt want me at thier party

[Bitbydeath]

Snow got me into Home as well. BIG THANKYOU from me also!

Although its temporarily lacking in customisation options i can definetly see how much fun Home will be, i'll be sure to tune in quite often to see what changes are made and to just hang out when im bored and have nothing better to do.

[cybrdrac]

could someone help me get into home beta. i would really like to go home if someone feels generous will someone please share it with me

[Thorzilla]

I love the review because it's honest. Detailed explanation and very fair.

I'd +Rep you, but I did like a day ago

Thanks mymain man lethal
Appreciate the lovin' D

[Zacharei]

Amazing Post, I like how you did not completely give a bias review, and jsut say Home is the greatest, that's what I somewhat expected was something short, and no information. What you provided was decent, accurate, well organized, thought out, and all and all it' s something you'd find a professional post. I would of even liked it probably had you posted something negeative about Home, just not as much lol :P.

[BLAZEFACE]

Yep i agree Great post thats pretty much how it is

[Thorzilla]

Amazing Post, I like how you did not completely give a bias review, and jsut say Home is the greatest, that's what I somewhat expected was something short, and no information. What you provided was decent, accurate, well organized, thought out, and all and all it' s something you'd find a professional post. I would of even liked it probably had you posted something negeative about Home, just not as much lol :P.

Well, thank you for your kind words

[Rauland]

can some1 rep + me
thanks in advance

[Xelis]

Nice review, good to see someone likes its features and what its bringing to the PS3, I'll be waiting for a full release before I dive into Home.

[Kratos8]

Thanks for the review too well done and nicely written, Home is going to evolve much like Ps3 has and become more and more diverse in my honest opinion.

[illusionstj]

With more people on it actually is a pretty cool place to meet new people, but to me it could be so much more. Right now it feels just like some kind of second life game to just hang out. Which yea, that's fine I guess, but if it isn't supposed to be a game then where are the implementations for it to be mixed in with the games we actually do play? I'm not going to keep logging on home to play bowling.

To me what they need to add:

1. A trophy room. I thought I've seen something like this before where a guy was walking around a black painted room with trophies inside of glass cabinets. It would be such a badass way to show off your achievements in games you've played by having a space friends could go see with nice looking trophies.

2. Game specific lounges. This I think was also mentioned before, but instead of just the mall where it's a general area for people to meet each other, where are the CoD4 rooms? Meet up for clan matches and things of that sort. Find other players with the same interest.

Meh, there were other things that I thought of before while I was walking around Home but right now I'm drawing a blank. They could take HOME really far to be honest. If buying a game like Resistance 2 and beating the whole thing unlocked the R2 wallpaper in your apartment, that'd be sweet. Not only that but all the trophies you'd get if they had a trophy room. They could take it even further where the higher your gamer level is the bigger your trophy room gets. So much stuff that HOME could be.

I know it's just the beta right now, but there isn't a whole lot to do other than just talk to people you don't really know. We don't even have a lot of customization options other than facial features. Everybody is wearing the same clothes. That being said, I'm excited to see where they're going to take this application.

[joeold]

In general, everyone was very friendly and open, raving in front of the Wipeout trailer TV or playing some pool.

I missed that video. I did however see the Socom one that was playing in the theater. Pretty cool. I do have to agree with the conclusion and that it is far from perfect but it is ready for the masses.

The meeting place I think you were referring to is the central plaza.

[RedDragon7]

Along with Thorzilla and illusionistj...

Home is a good networking place. It is seemingly in a "lite" version right now with some key features missing, i.e. Trophy room and Game lounges as illusionst pointed out but I'm assuming they were developing those outside of the Beta. Occasionally implementing them and then removing them again for further maintenance. But that's just a guess.

Either way, when Home is released its not going to be the feature packed virtual world it can be. People will be constantly giving suggestions and I'm sure Sony already have quite a few in the works. It's going to be a continuously upgraded system between putting in new features and working on existing ones.

Overall, I'm not super impressed but I'm not disappointed really either. Hopefully the "full" release will satisfy the current needs until more gets added in slowly.

[tommylj]

Good and honest review!
There is just something that's been bothering me whenever I hear about Home. Nobody seems to talk about the trophy room feature any more? Also that huge room displaying hundreds and hundreds of trophies that sort of looked like the senate from Star Wars. Whatever happened to that? Did they can those features, or will they be implemented later? I hope that the latter is the case

[silvermanor]

Why is my theatre just one ghetto looking room? I thought it had 2 levels and 10 screens like in the videos.

[radgamer420]

Wow that was an impressive, unbiased and detailed review and I agree with everything you said. +rep for an enjoyable read.

[John25]

good read great review +rep

[illusionstj]

Good and honest review!
There is just something that's been bothering me whenever I hear about Home. Nobody seems to talk about the trophy room feature any more? Also that huge room displaying hundreds and hundreds of trophies that sort of looked like the senate from Star Wars. Whatever happened to that? Did they can those features, or will they be implemented later? I hope that the latter is the case

Honestly I agree with Thor with that they could release it now. I'm sure they do have most of the features ready, and more customization tools that we could use. I'm also sure that NOBODY would mind having what they are letting us beta test now. With the downloading in application tool to go to new lobbies it's about perfect already to be released. Just give us the new content along the way.

[Lirion]

That's why they'r testing the servers right now by inviting tons of people. Once they know it can handle it, they'll open the doors.

[Trojans24601]

nice read and nice pics too o and not a bad post at all must say I was starting to lose interest but heck maybe there is still hope

[silvermanor]

nice read and nice pics too o and not a bad post at all must say I was starting to lose interest but heck maybe there is still hope

Home for me is usually packed. Never a table , arcade game or alley free. I love it though.

[scoll]

I was on it last night for awhile was quiet impressed with it the camera will take a bit of getting used to and the load times can be very slow sometimes took about 10 mins to load a game of chess and took ages for my clothing to load up in the end i just choose anything

The visuals are class as soon as you walk on your balcony i was impressed and the communication is very good i got talking to people from all over europe in the square in no time.

[radgamer420]

I was just there and 2 sony administrators were there answering questions and taking feedback from me and about 20 other people gathered around in the mall. It was pretty cool.