Heading Home
Well, after multiple delays, eternal beta testing, and lots of excuses, Sony finally released Home, their much-hyped online socializing space, in a public beta for the PS3. Was it worth the long wait?
I was actually a part of the earlier closed beta, but due to the Terms of Use, wasn’t allowed to say much about it except to my fiancee. So most of my impressions come from that and not the just-released public beta. Some things may have changed but, frankly, I honestly didn’t care enough to log back in and find out.
Let me state, right up front, that I’m probably not the target audience for Home. I don’t do online social networking. I don’t have a lot of online friends. Don’t have a MySpace page. Don’t go on FaceBook. Ignore Twitter. So an online service that seems to exist for the express purpose of walking around and talking to strangers is probably not my thing.
Once you log in to Home (after wasting half-an-hour downloading multiple patches), you get to create your avatar, which, despite your best efforts, will look nothing like you. Having created your blank-eyed zombie wax non-representation of yourself, and dressed it in one of roughly five available outfits, you’re turned loose on your spartan apartment. Here you’re given a brief tutorial on how to move around the world, interact with objects, access chat and emoticons, and then directed to go mingle with other people.
And herein lies the first problem with Home: other people. Within my first five minutes in the closed beta, I was treated to extensive profanity, racial slurs, griefing, and random jackassery, all of it horribly misspelled and presented in little talk bubbles. It’s like any other Internet chat room, populated with hyperactive and overstimulated but undereducated teenagers drunk on the anonymity afforded by their keyboards, but now with the added benefit of having little cartoon characters to also get in your way and dance at you.
If you manage to make your way through the assembled douches (eighty percent of them dressed exactly like you), you can finally get at the true content of Home, which is: shopping. Make no mistake about it, Home is little more than an online mall, although you’re not actually buying real things. You can buy new clothes for your avatar, new furniture for your apartment, new content for your games. You get to spend real money to buy imaginary items for an electronic person. And they say we’re in a recession. Of course, you don’t have to spend money if you don’t want to. You can simply walk around the available fifty square yards and stare at the advertising posters slapped on every surface. You can go into the movie theater and watch “movies” advertising upcoming Sony games and other products (all in lower resolution and at slower speeds than if you just downloaded them yourself). Or you can just sit and look around at all the billboards and posters pimping products you can buy in the real world.
And that’s really my biggest grief with Home. Not the asshats, not the constant ads, but the simple fact that there’s really nothing to do. You can walk around. You can shop. You can play some low-end “games” which have been done better elsewhere. You can be marketed to. But why? Why would I waste valuable game time wandering around, surrounded by ADD-suffering illiterates, simply for the pleasure of doing so?
Maybe I’m not the audience for Home. Maybe it’s the coolest thing ever for the MySpace crowd. Maybe it’s fun to listen to strangers talk about wanting to rape each other’s mothers. Or maybe it’s another major miscalculation by Sony about what their gaming audience wants.
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3 Responses to “Heading Home”
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December 13th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
I’d say we just got old, but I’ve always hated people. Though one on one, I’m very into listening to someone talk about raping my mother, this entire thing sounds pretty ghastly. So what’s going on here? Is there really some perception among Sony and Microsoft that the reason that Wii is outselling all of it is because of customizable avatars? Not to zero in on just this facet of home, but…well…I guess I am.
Well, I think Sony and MS need to realize that the reason that they are getting their asses kicked by the Wii is plain and simple the 5 digits and Decimal point after the dollar sign + the broader appeal factor of their library of games.
Obviously Sony’s price point factor is huge, still, and now that Blu Ray player standalones are now considerably lower than the cost of a PS3 I think that’s got to be cutting into their sales some more.
Honestly, while I’m still leaning toward a PS3 rather than a standalone Blu Ray, I think it still becomes less and less likely for me with each passing day. Whereas I can justify my 360 purchase flat out with just the enjoyment I’ve gotten from very few titles like Gears of War 1 for instance, there still isn’t one PS3 title that makes me wish I had the console for. They’ve got no real properties at this point. They’re fighting Mario, Zelda, Master Chief and Marcus Fenix with who? Online Shopping and Avatars belonging to foul-mouthed grade school kids? Every title they have that’s worth a look (from my perspective) is released in concert with the 360 and/or Wii versions. I’d like to sink into Resistance and one or two others just to give them a shot, but not THAT much.
December 15th, 2008 at 8:08 am
I have to say, “avatars” are pretty neat but I think people would be more interested in customizing a game character. I’d much rather have a customized (armor, colors, whatever) guy from Haze or another game than “me” in clothing.
Services like these have to offer more free content instead of just building an online strip mall filled with typical mall rats. I mean, honestly, this sounds like a virtual version of the popular “drop the kids off at the mall for a few hours” deed.
What a waste.
December 20th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
“They’re fighting Mario, Zelda, Master Chief and Marcus Fenix with who?”
Solid Snake, Kratos, whoever the dude in Resistance is, the Killzone guy, and the adorable little Sackboy. I’m not saying any one of those is enough to justify the purchase of a console, but taken all together, it’s a respectable lineup.
But Home is still incredibly lame.