PlayStation Home (PS3) – First Impression
Ugh. My first experience with Home was on its public beta launch day on December 11th, 2008. I originally planned to write a preview then, but similar to most other’s experience, Home was inaccessible for the first half of the day. My notes from that day are ugly, filled with error codes and timeout lengths. I bit my tongue and decided to hold off for a bit to give Home a fair shake. It suffices to say, while there’s many more details to discuss now that Home is “working” (and granted, has been since mid-day on the 11th), the general feeling I have about Home hasn’t changed at all.
The first thing I did (as does everyone) when finally getting into the service was create my avatar. I spent about 5 minutes trying to duplicate my handsome self, which was all to easy, but I ended up looking too much like myself, i.e. a totally generic asshole. So, instead, I went for broke and created the most distorted looking female I could, while trying to keep to a certain level of realism. I apologize sincerely if this resembles you or anyone you know, you or they are certainly beautiful on the inside:
Do you like my makeup?
I then was dumped into my personal space, which I had the option of decorating as I saw fit:
It's sad getting dumped into a dump. This is a popular decorating scheme I hear.
The remainder of my time with Home has been spent sampling the few things there are to do in and around the Central Plaza as well as the Far Cry 2 and Uncharted spaces that are available to explore. All told, this takes about 15 minutes (well, 20 if you count the initial downloading of each area that is required, and 25 if you count the download and the loading time).
An additional hour was spent wondering around getting called a fat whore by my fellow Home-ers which inspired me to spend a few minutes sitting on the ground and selecting the “agree” option from the dialog menu. As a female, do this and you’ll have guys surrounding you in no time. Give it try . . . if I described what this action looks like, I might come off as a classless pervert, which, hey, I’m a classy guy, so just give it a try for yourself already. UPDATE – Apparently, I was part of the problem.
Ryan Davis over at Giant Bomb has a wonderful write-up explaining how sub par of an experience he had with the rest of Home, one I can endorse whole-heartedly. For all intents and purposes (also, I’m lazy), he took the words right out of my mouth. I will though COMPLETELY ANNIHILATE Giant Bomb’s coverage and offer up these codes for the Uncharted space. Within that space, there are three doors with keypads, hiding rooms that have some things you can look at, and chairs you can sit in. It’s even worse than it sounds, but, here’s the codes to get in:
PlayStation Home Scully’s Bar Door Codes
Downstairs 1024 and then 1577383
Upstairs Right Door 24312
Upstairs Left Door 41675
Now that I’ve wasted that much more of your time, I owe it to you to wrap this First (and likely Last) Impression up, so yes, mmm hmmm, don’t use this service until further notice.
