First of all, I want to give you a heads up. There are another load of beta codes being sent out this Thursday - that's Thursday 27th November 2008. The best way to get into it (or at least to try to) is to go
to the official PS3 site, sign in with your PSN details, and then make a grovelling post asking for a beta code. Best place to put it would be in
this thread, but it can't hurt to make more, eh?
Anyways....
I was lucky enough recently to get a Home beta key. After hearing about this for far too long now I was kinda hyped for it, but I had
Nikolai's comments at the forefront of my thoughts, so that I was pretty much expecting the worst. Thankfully, since Nikolai's comments, it would appear a LOT has changed, and I'm liking the experience.
The initial download was 77MB, which was pretty painless. Starting it up, I was told to "reserve 3gig of hard drive" for the various components of Home. At the time I wasn't too sure what this was for, but I found out later. Keep reading.
The customer creation screen is as basic as it comes, and much like Nikolai said, the options are very few and far between. I too have a beard, but there isn't one in the options. So now I look like a 1970s porn star with nothing but a 'tache adorning my top lip. Clothing too is sparse, so at this point I wasn't overly impressed.
After being dropped into my apartment, things started looking up considerably. The room is plain white with 2 walls solid and 2 walls patio doors leading to a balcony. The view from here of the Home Harbour is just jaw-dropping. Had I a HDTV, I'm quite certain I'd be confusing it with a real life scene, but even in standard definition its gorgeous.
Heading off to the Home Square, I suddenly realised what the 3gig "reserve" was for. Each area you visit is an optional area that you must first download before you can visit it. At first I thought "What the hell? Why not just let me download one big file and have them all already?!?". But then I thought "Well, what if there was an area I didn't have any interest in? Waste of space, no?". I'm still on the fence about whether or not this is a good idea, but once an area is downloaded, you need not download it again. I guess this is an easy way of adding new areas when Sony make them, so you don't need to download the whole thing again and again.
In the Home Square, there are screens around the edges showing game trailers, and a few billboard posters also advertising games. There are also 3 other areas you can access, all requiring an extra download.
1) The Home Theatre, which is a cinema currently showing movie trailers, interviews, etc.
2) The Bowling Alley, which has a fully working ten pin bowling area, several fully working pool tables, and arcade machines that, yes, you can play, and which also unlock bonus items such as new clothing, items for your apartment, etc.
3) The Shopping Mall is a massive, 2 storey shopping centre that, at the time of writing, had no items whatsoever for sale. This is obviously because the program is in a beta form and nowhere near complete.
After walking around for a bit, it suddenly hit me what Home was all about. In fact, it came to me in the middle of a conversation with a guy about the Game Launching feature (I'll cover this later).
I was talking to someone I would never have spoken to in any other scenario, and actually having fun.
Looking around I could see groups of people talking about all sorts of things, from themselves, to their impressions of the beta, to people simply advertising their sites. And thats when I realised that this was more than just a Sims clone. Its more than just customising your crib and your character. Its about making new friends outside of frenzied Warhawk battles, outside of Burnout Paradise races, outside of games altogether.
Take one part The Sims, one part Facebook, and one part Second Life, and you have Home. Sure, it doesn't sound too appetising on paper.... Pizza is made from dead animals and stuff you dig up from the ground, then coated in curdled milk, but goddamn, pizza is awesome ain't it?
Continuing on, there's an option called "Game Launching". Couldn't work out what it was for until I took
LittleBigPlanet out and put
Warhawk in. Straight away it came up with "Do you want to start Game Launching?". Selecting "Yes" took me to a screen where it allowed me to prepare a server for
Warhawk, select game types, etc, and then invite friends to the game. So what does this mean? Well, you could go into the Home Square, put out the word for an online game, and then simultaneously launch everyone into the same game from one single spot.
So that's Home. Its not a game, just a very flashy application. So why is this being touted as the "next big thing"? Well, I can explain in one single word.
"Community".
The thing with the Xbox 360 community is that when you buy the machine, you get a headset with it, immediately allowing you to jump online and meet new people. You didn't even need to be in a game, as you could chat to anyone on your friends list regardless of where they were or what they were doing.
With the PS3, you don't get this option. Sure, you get free online, but you don't get any way of communicating with people other than using the business end of a TOW missile. Not exactly very friendly, is it? In contrast to the 360 headset, you can use any old bluetooth headset with the PS3, but this is an extra cost that most people don't want to fork out. With this in mind, its easy to understand why the PS3 community is nowhere near as big as the 360's.
With Home, I believe that this will not so much resolve this problem, nor do I believe it will destroy the 360 community. Instead, what I believe it will do is start to introduce PS3 owners to a world they were previously unaware of, to introduce them to new friends and fellow gamers, and all the while give them a fully interactive world in which to do this.
The PS3 community may never be as big or popular as the 360 community, but from my time with Home, I can say that the PS3 community will be having more fun.
