Playstation Home

Has anyone tested PS Home beta yet? I did so yesterday, and I found it quite interesting, although it feels a bit like PS3 Sims and I guess it should attract more younger people than older users.

I was connected at 2-3 AM, and there were still a lot of people around. I created my character, with the stuff that is available so far, and visited the different locations.

The bowling centre is nicely done, I also played some games, IceBreaker and Echochrome on the arcade machines. Then I played a 4 player bowling round, and i was good: Strike, 9, Strike, Spare... was on 1st place so far, then I got disconnected :mad:

But I already had some problems I knew I would encounter, people spamming, trolling, flaming, the whole palette of things you see in other chat rooms. That was so annoying, playing bowling and getting flamed in between from the guy who played with me. Hello? Wanna meet and play facebreaker instead of bowling?

Don't know how they want to stop that once the whole home system is running in non beta phase. I guess they can't.

But otherwise it was cool, you can watch trailers in the home cinema, go to your appartment, buy stuff (not available yet) which does of course cost you real money, play games, chat and there will be many other stuff to come yet.

I'm curious in which direction the whole stuff will drift.

It is an interesting concept, and having a virtual world as the home hub environment of a system has been considered for a long time now. However I'm not sure what direction this could take, and what value it actually has to the PS3 community in the long term. I'm sure Sony have thought very long and hard about it though and have many ideas and plans for it into the future.

It makes me smile to think that only now are they utilising such an idea for a consoles online cummunity user interface hub system, when you consider that the Dreamcast game Phantasy Star Online used something very similar almost 10 years ago!

But then, many MMOs since have used something similar. Earth and Beyond had a good community system; docking at a port or space station, you could leave your ship and walk around alongside the other players, interacting with them, exchanging items, money, missions, ideas etc... So Sony's Playstation home idea is really the conclusion of all these game ideas.

I hope it does turn out to be really good and work well. However it is in danger of becoming a big gimmick, open for abuse, and also the home of some annoying players that you will have trouble avoiding while in the environments, as you can already encountered. Have Sony included an ignore system, so you can block members you don't want to interact with? I think if they haven't, they need to, as it is the best way to prevent annoying people from ruining your time on the network.

The question is, is it better than the alternatives M$ and Nintendo have?

Managed to log in once and take a look around. Looks good to me, but something like this falls or stands with the community that makes use of it, and sadly, there's just no way to get rid of the morons that like to ruin everything for everyone.

At this point, I don't see myself on Home very often, but I do like the initiative ... if Sony manages to keep the idiots out and offer new stuff regularly, I can see it developing into something good.

I don't think there is a way to keep such people out of a network. You will always get them annoying or ruining others enjoyment. Moderators of the network might help, but not sure how you would moderate it as it would be far more complicated than a forum.

Had a quick go on Home, and spent about ten minutes dancing around a bubble machine with another person, whilst others came and watched or joined in... We even did the Locomotion (but without Kylie)

There is no locomotion without Kylie ;)

True, there is DEFINITELY no LOW-Commotion without the K-Factor!