Why Go Home?

Oh, Give me a home...okay, so I won’t ever win American Idol, but I do have something to get off my chest about Sony’s new, revolutionary, totally, like, awesome service: Home. When you first boot up your PS3, you don’t get any kind of prompt that asks you to download it, instead you need to go to the PlayStation Store and enter a code in order to download it (I got into the Beta and that’s probably why I had to do it that way). That was the intro to my experience to Home. I wish it were easier, but for the PS3, nothing including games, playing online and those pain in the ass monthly downloads to update my firmware has ever been easy. And guess what; creating an Avatar isn’t easy either. As opposed to my 360 Avatar that was fun and easy, this one was close to creating an exact digital copy of yourself. You could customize just about every facet of your avatar, which is both tedious and time consuming.

Once that’s finish, your prompted to go directly into your Home. I must admit, when I first saw my “Home”, I was immediately jealous that it wasn’t my real home. I had a great view of a beautiful harbor with sail boats and yachts and the most beautiful water that came in close second to the beauty of St. Maartin’s crystal clear water. But, with a 50” plasma and an HDMI connector, what would you expect. I thought that I had lucked out and gotten a primo spot, but it turns out that a lot of other gamers got the exact same thing. Although, I should have been disappointed, I just said, “Figures.”

There is only a couple things you could do in your “home” and that mainly consisted of dancing to no music, watching a bubble machine, re-arrange furniture and sit on the porch and listen to the digital birds chirping somewhere in the distance. I decided to venture out and enjoy some company, so I tried to venture out my door. I was met with a “Please download Central Plaza 39.5 MB”. Okay, so I had to wait for that. After a few minutes, I walked back to the door and ventured out for my first trip into the Home world. I was impressed for about three minutes, and that consisted of three minutes of watching a trailer on a GIANT jumbotron-sized TV that was showing a game trailer for the PS3 (nice product placement, Sony). I then ventured out and saw the theater and was surprised that all I could do was watch a making of trailer for SOCOM: Confrontation. After that I went to the mall and looked at all the empty shops. Then it was on to the bowling alley, but I didn’t go in there. After being disappointed for ten full minutes, I decided to socialize so I walked to a little outside dance floor and started to dance, although, it wasn’t that successful, because no one was paying attention to me (all the other guys were huddled around these two women). So, I decided to just pack it in.

What a waste of my time. I didn’t buy a PS3 so that I can walk around in a virtual world an be absolutely bored. I could have caught a movie, but it was just some making of video and didn’t offer me the option of watching something I wanted. Not only that, but it wasn’t even private, which makes me believe that going forward, all the movies that they will be showing, will not be chosen by me. So much for a user controlled world. Let’s just call Home, what it really is: One Big Advertisement for Sony.