Playstation Home

[ManekiNeko]

Man oh geez, I just finished a marathon session of Playstation HOME. Unfortunately, half of that marathon was spent staring at a download screen. This game (or service, or time-waster, or virtual environment, or whatever) has some viciously long load times, and they're both lengthy and alarmingly frequent. Can't I just peek my head inside the bowling alley? Oh, come on! Fine, I'll just sit here on this bench and twiddle my fingers until you're finished loading. Again.

The whole experience (when I wasn't waiting for everything to load) reminds me a lot of the time I visited The World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta, Georgia. Everything is spit-polished, isolated from the rest of the world, and packed to overflowing with corporate propaganda. In the central square, there are theaters with advertisements for Sony games, monolithic PSP Gos hovering over the ground, news crawls on buildings hyping the next great PS3 game, arcades containing an extremely small sample of the PSP game Echochrome... it's Sony's celebration of itself, and it's all quite shameless. It's a small wonder there were so many people in the town square... probably around thirty or forty, with some clustering around the Sony indoctrination monitors awaiting their commands from fearless leader Kaz Hirai.

I have to give Sony credit for the graphics... they are very nice, especially in the user's home where you can look out at a harbor full of ships, some sailing and some resting at port. The avatars are naturally a lot more detailed than the ones on the Xbox 360 and Wii, but there's some personality lost in the transition. Photorealism isn't always the best bet, especially when you're out in the town square and all the other avatars appear as freaky ghosts because their textures haven't loaded yet.

It was an, uh, illuminating experience, but I think I'll just stick with voice chat from now on. It's not as complicated, isn't full of load time pauses, and doesn't bombard you with Playstation advertisements at every step.

[Yesman]

The biggest problem I have with virtual home worlds like that is sometimes you just want to play a friggin' game and not get bogged down with all the extra crap. I don't know how many times I load up the Xbox 360 dashboard and then go through all the stupid screens to see who the new gamer idiot of the week is or what new download extra content specials are going on or what frickin' episode of Family Guy is available for download. Then I realize I just wasted fifteen minutes of my already short time to play.

If this was a virtual world bombarded by ads I'd probably never get to the game. I'd be too busy looking at a vitual sunset and then say, "Crap, I have to go to bed. Thanks for wasting my time, dammit!" Whatever, I'm sure I can just set up the system to load directly to the game but I really like the new systems with an interface. I never liked watching a loading screen for a system that never loaded anything with no disc or cartridge. Of course, you ever try turning on a system like Atari 2600 and THEN jamming a cartridge in the slot? Priceless!

[kmt3]

Yeah, I tried it way back when it came out a year ago and me and my friends tried it once and got bored and never touched it again. Areas take an insane amount of time to load and once the fun factor of "oooh, you can make your character dance!" wears off you just realize that spending actual money to buy virtual clothes is the height of stupidity and you delete it because it takes up entirely too much space on your hard drive.

Anyway, what's your PSN I.D. Jess? I'll add you.

[ManekiNeko]

That'd be ArugulaZ.

[kmt3]

Muchas gracias, amigo.

[johnroche]

Well, at least Sony is consistent. From what I remember, it was about as much fun as watching paint dry when I tried it, but at least seeing the dry paint can potentially give you a sense of accomplishment.