PlayStation Home

Is it really fair to review something like PlayStation Home? After all, it's not a video game in the traditional sense. Or in any sense, really. There are no objectives in PlayStation Home ... unless you count trying to figure out which girl avatars are actually girls and which ones are guys pretending to be girls.

What PlayStation Home reminds me most of is a chat room circa 1994. (Do chat rooms even still exist? They must... right?) It's all there. The aforementioned guys posing as girls, lonely guys flocking around girls (or fake girls), guys trying desperately to get girls to come back to their "private space". Hmm... I never realized until just now how much that sounds like regular Friday night. Without the guys posing as girls, I suppose (or at least, I would hope).

Anyway... Home features a pretty robust avatar creation system. You can manipulate the minute details on your avatar's face, ranging from how far apart your eyes are to how deep your wrinkles are. But in playing Home, it seems like that level of detail barely even matters. You never see another user's avatar as close up and as big as you see your own in the avatar creation screen, so does it matter that my mouth is slightly wider than someone else's? There may be "millions of combinations" for avatar creation but what differentiates one avatar from another are the big details like clothes. Out of the box, Home offers a handful of clothing options with more available for purchase which leads to the hilarious situation of everyone wearing the exact same thing.

It's important to note that technically PlayStation Home is still in beta, which means that it will be constantly evolving and growing. But as of right now, there isn't much to do. Each of the different regions gets slightly different spaces to interact in. In the North American version, we get a theater, a mall and a bowling alley as well as a few third party spaces. But even within those spaces, I can't see spending more than a few minutes in each one. (Although, I have to admit, I am kinda addicted to the Carriage Return arcade game in the bowling alley...)

When Home was first announced in March 2007, it seemed fresh and innovative. It's hard to tell if I'm disappointed by Home because the 21 month wait built up my expectations unreasonably high or if Home simply fails to deliver what it initially promised. Stepping back a bit, some of Home's shortcomings are result of the users and not the software. Interacting with other users can be challenging but only because most users don't have either a keyboard or a headset to communicate with. Sure, the PS3 offers an on-screen keyboard, but trying to type out a full sentence on that thing makes conversations move at a snail's pace.

But some of Home's shortcomings are purely it's own. Instead of having each of the spaces connected to feel as if it were one giant world, a load screen makes each space feel like discrete rooms. Each of the spaces needs to be downloaded initially before it can be accessed, which just means a lot of waiting around in your apartment the first time you launch Home. And sometimes you'll need to redownload a space you've already downloaded which only leads to more waiting.

That being said, there is a lot of potential in PlayStation Home. I'm actually excited more by the possibilities that Home offers than what is currently available. While playing Home, I thought to myself on a number of occasions "this would be better if". And if I idly thought it, I'm sure that the developers have thought of it way before I did and have it on a list of things they'd like to implement. If the updates to the PS3 firmware are any indication, PlayStation Home will be updated regularly and my "this would be better if"s will become "this is awesome"s.

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