Gamertell

On December 10, 2008, Sony Computer Entertainment of Europe and America both confirmed that the long awaited PlayStation Home would finally go into public beta on December 11, 2008 (today). The American beta will officially go public at around 7:00 a.m. EST, so I still had some time left in the super secret closed version of the beta to explore around the yet-untainted world of Home.

I received my invite into the Home beta around the Thanksgiving holiday (or November 27, 2008 for our worldwide readers), but there was little to do in Home other than socialize with my fellow beta testers. There weren’t even items to purchase in the stores at the time.

Now as things are starting to come together, the Home world is getting more interesting. Here’s a quick walk through Sony’s new Home.

Upon downloading the Home client, Home visitors are required to create an avatar for themselves in the Home world. Avatar creation in Home is seriously deep, though it doesn’t have to be, you can opt to use one of the preset avatars if you don’t feel like fiddling with the many avatar options.

I chose to go the distance and fiddle with as many options as I could, yet, somehow my character still ended up looking generic. I guess I’m not that creative after all. Visitors have the option to chose their gender, facial structure, facial features, height and width, skin color and features, and lastly their hair color and style. There are plenty of options to make your avatar as unique as you want it to be, from looking like you came from the Stone Age to looking L.A. hip.

After I created my generic tourist, I had to give him an outfit. Clothing options consist of your basic head, hands, torso, legs, accessories, and jewelry categories. I figured since I was just touring the Home world, I would go with something a little more “journalist-sheik”. So I chose the olive jacket and jeans combination with the headphone accessory and low-top sneakers. I sort-of look like James Sunderland from Silent Hill 2 or Kiefer Sutherland from The Vanishing.  Since I’m a closed beta tester, I received more options in the clothing department than first time visitors will be offered, but all visitors will be able to purchase a variety of items in time.

After I was all set to enter the world of Home, I was taken to the Harbour Studio. The Harbour Studio is where I’m guessing all visitors to Home will begin. The Studio is like a Studio apartment, it will be your home (no pun intended) base until you purchase a new one. The Studio comes pre-loaded with furniture that you can re-arrange as you please. It also comes with a balcony over-looking a… harbor. The place looks very nice and offers up your first true taste of how good Home looks. The guys at Sony spent a lot of time creating this world and the polish really shows. They even included physics when you are rearranging your furniture. Seeing my lamp fall on the floor was actually interesting to watch.

After I had my brief laugh, I decided that I didn’t really click with the white furniture, so I decided to go shopping for some more. Walking to the door I was greeted by a menu that prompted me to download the “Central Plaza” area. Here’s another thing that turned me off Home in the closed beta, having to constantly download an area. Luckily, Sony remedied this problem and you will only have to download the areas once to your hard drive and then they will just load the next time. The “Central Plaza” area wasn’t that big, only about 23-20MBs and downloaded quickly. After I “materialized” (seriously, when characters load into an area, they show a silhouette resembling the “Silver Surfer” before they show up) into the Central Plaza. As you may have guessed, this is the central hub of the Home world.

The first thing I noticed was that there is no run button, you move at a designated pace, no faster. To the left of me was a giant screen playing a Far Cry 2 trailer and to my right was the “Home Theater” where Socom Confrontation was playing. I decided to pop into the theater first where I was just in time as the video was nearly finished loading. Looking around, I saw about twelve people, all cracking jokes about the movie/trailer. Since I decided to stand rather than sit down, I popped back out of the theater to continue exploring the central plaza.
Back in the plaza, the first thing I saw was a break dancing man with a Mohawk. Dancing is seems to be the thing to do in the plaza as there was a great number of people participating in it. I should also mention that Sony is planning a huge dance party at 6:00 p.m. EST on December 11, 2008.

Looking around the Plaza I happened to find a Warhawk ad, a couple of Qore posters, and another, smaller screen playing the Far Cry 2 trailer. I also checked out the “Listen@Home Prototype”. This is essentially a music booth where you can change the background music of Home. As of my visit, there were only three tracks available, I’m guessing though you can use your own tunes that you have saved on your PlayStation 3 or that Sony will just be adding some as they please. While a music booth may not seem interesting, where else are you going to find a large group of people doing the “running man”?

Across the plaza I saw the bowling alley and reluctantly headed in (after downloading of course). I’m usually not one for bowling but inside I found Sony had included more than just bowling lanes. There were two pool tables and two arcade areas with about five cabinets in each area. Those numbers are probably going to become a problem when Home goes public, but for right now, I got to enjoy them without having to wade through thick lines. Over the lanes I noticed ads for Echochrome and to my left was a screen playing a PlayStation Portable advertisement, the one where people are freaking out while playing their PSPs. I made a beeline for the arcades and was pleasantly surprised to find that there are real working games on the cabinets. The one I was on allowed you to demo three levels of Echochrome.

That was one of the coolest features in a service I’ve seen to date.

Leaving the arcade, I mean Bowling Alley. I had remembered that I ventured out to buy furniture for my Studio apartment. Luckily, the Mall is right across from the Bowling Alley, so after a little download time I headed on in.

The Mall is a story building with the same stores on each floor. My guess is Sony wanted to give customers convenience or maybe just take some lag off their store servers. The stores consist of places to purchase real-estate, clothing, furniture, and nick-knacks for your house.

I headed into the real-estate store and purchased a Summer House. Transactions at the Home stores occur just like they do on the PlayStation Store.

After I finished shopping I decided to ditch my studio apartment and head onto my summer house. The problem was I couldn’t find it right off the bat. Turns out you have to bring up the Home menu, which you do by pressing start, which will bring up a little gadget with your Home options.

Honestly, I thought for sure that the gadget would be a PSP, but it turned out to look more like a cell phone. Here is where you can find your profile, locations, friends list, and your clubs, find alerts, launch games, find out about the community, and get help, as well as adjust various settings. This is also where you can find your wardrobe, which will bring you back to the character select screen and where you set your default “Home”. I set my default location for “Summer House” and even had the menu screen automatically take me there.

What a change the Summer House is to the Harbour Studio. Instead of the light and bright tone of the harbor, I walked into a warm and luxury get-away complete with sunset and fireplaces. The view outside changed from a harbor to mountains and a futuristic monorail line (without the monorail cars). My house had no furniture in it so I took it upon myself to decorate it, because who else was going to?

To redecorate an area, you will have to bring up the menu gadget and click on Personal, then redecorate personal space. The redecorating menu will pop up will the various categories of furniture. I decided to put in two black sofas to keep with the warm theme. Arranging furniture will take you into a 360 degree view of the furniture piece that will be floating in mid-air. You can lower, raise, rotate, and then finally place your piece to your preferred location. I placed two sofas, some storage units, two lamps, and a robot into my house. I assume your Trophies can be displayed, but since I lack any I can’t tell you.

After I finished decorating, I headed to the door which took me back to the Central Plaza. Deciding that I had fully explored Home and that my house was redecorated neatly, I embarked to do the last thing on my list: socialize with others.

By tapping R1 and L1, quick menus will pop up with different communication styles, such as dancing, celebrating, showing disappointment, and different greetings. Pressing triangle brings up the on-screen keyboard. After briefly conversing with people, I get the sense they enjoy Home for what it is, a place to socialize with others when your real friends are too busy having lives or just don’t want to leave their houses due to weather or laziness. Really, that’s all this is, a social networking platform that just so happens to be centralized around gaming culture.

While it probably would have been much easier to stick with a menu based socializing system, I really have to commend Sony for actually pulling off something this ambitious. It may not be your thing personally, but it’s going to appeal to someone and more importantly for Sony, Home has a lot of potential to appeal to the casual gamers. There are going to be people who find Home’s customization gripping enough to keep them interested in this. All Sony has to do now is drop the price of the PlayStation 3 to realistically compete for the wallets of casual gamers at retail and it just may have something to bring them out of the dark pit it’s currently treading in.

Read [Playstation Blog] Via [PCWorld]

Check out the gallery: Sony's Playstation Home screen shots