[tacotaskforce]

PS Home is a sort of hilarious project Sony's been playing with on the PS3 this generation. Apparently it's been fairly successful for them too, which is maybe even more hilarious.

The most obvious comparison for Home is to Second Life, but I feel a comparison to The Palace might be closer. There's no feeling of ownership, and much less sense of wonder, in Home than there is in SL. Home mostly exists to sell you things, and the fact that it works as a chat room is largely inconsequential. Still, it's free to access, and you can't remove the button from the XMB, so a lot of people access it anyways.

I've been checking in on Home off and on since I got a PS3 in 2010 and taking lots of photos while doing so. Sadly the camera is considered an active item, so you can't use it wile playing the games (or the "games"), but I can still take photos of most of the lobbies and non-interactive areas.


First up, everyone who logs into Home get a, well, they call it an apartment, but it's barely even that. You can swap between a few set wallpapers and move the furniture around, but that's about it. Every Personal Space lets you set up to 50 furniture items, and you can own as many Personal Spaces as you can buy (usually $5 each, but they've been releasing snazzier ones with access to an on demand streaming service for $10+)


Here you can see some of the crap I've collected: Two Bumpy Trot toys and a Hammerin' Harry that were weirdly free (impossible to buy now thanks to irem falling apart), a drink machine I can't remember getting, some figurines from RE5 trophies, and a mod figure statue from the modnation space in Home. RE5 came out right at the same time as home, and has more integration than most other games. Nowadays figurines like that are stuff you'd have to buy separately for $2-3 each. For the record my costume is the only thing I've spent money on in Home; $2 for the clothing, and $0.50 for the helmet. I have had multiple people compliment me on my 'cool dr2 helmet'. Kids, this is why Megaman Legends 3 was cancelled.


These swell arcade cabinets came from the Namco Collection demo, of all things. They sort of work too, if you use them they'll boot either the demo or the full game if you have it installed. This kind of integration is also not done anymore.


After you leave your apartment you end up in the central square, or you would have if you accessed Home before the revamp last year. The central square was one of the most consistently occupied areas, always filled with people running laps despite the fact that they would one day die and their time on earth was finite. It was also one of the areas most consistently updated. This, for instance, was the minigame used to announce the new Midway space. Jump in the cannon, hit a target, get a free T-shirt. Free T-shirts will be a recurring theme.


This being the holiday season Home also has a seasonal Santa's Workshop space, and this area was packed all the time. IIRC every other day during the 12 days of christmas there'd be a new minigame that you could play for free items, like a snowflake wand, candles, or a light up christmas tree. The items didn't look that bad, but Home was still in its infancy at this point, and several of the minigames were so bugged that they were unplayable. That elf behind me is moonwalking, by the way.


Santa showed up every so often too, and handed out some of the quests. And if you were wondering what those elves looked like up close...


Now you know, and can never unknow.


Like SL Home has its furries, but they have to be a lot more creative. More recently some proper furry costumes have been added to the stores, but, well, I'll get to that later on.


Something else about Home back in 2010 was that there were very few free clothing items you could find, so people would wear any dumbass looking thing if it was free. I'll cover the Midway proper in the next update.

So that wraps up PS Home's 2010 holiday space. Final verdict?


It sucks!

See you next time!
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[Persona]

That first screenshot almost justifies the existence of Home.
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[Takashi]

If you have money to burn, Granzella (that consists mostly of ex-Irem employees) has a bunch of Home lobbies you can explore. They just released a summer-casual set of clothes, too. I have the youtube links, but can't do it at work.

[The Blueberry Hill]

Man, this makes me with Nintendo'd just include a big online Animal Crossing with every Wii-U, and let you access all your Virtual Console things through there sort of like how the NES games work in the first game.

[geinou]

Hilarious stuff, tacotaskforce! Thanks for the pictures and the explanation. Here's my (short) experience with Home:

Went online on New Years Eve 2010 because it was impossible to reach a friends home party since all the roads were smooth as glass thanks to a very hard winter that reached its climax around christmas. Driving was impossible and even the trains didn't roll, so I tried out Home. As I said, I went online and looked around for a bit. Tried to play some arcade games, which didn't work properly. Then I went to the cinema to watch a trailer for the Astroboy Hollywood movie (did that movie ever get a release? I can't remember). The trailer was shown in a loop, so people who were bored like me stood around and watched it multiple times, maybe in hope the cinema would show something else after some time. Sometimes people started to talk to each other about the trailer. It didn't get much better, even after the like 10th time you watched it. After like 30 minutes I left the cinema and went to the central square. There was a big screen showing the asian woman from the PSN store (unfortunately I can't remember her name, sorry) who's doing some sort of preview show (I think) I've never watched. What disturbed me: People were gathering around the screen, trying to either flirt to every female avatar or talking out loud how "hot" they found the asian woman on the screen, fantasising about a night with her.

That was the moment I logged off and never came back. I probably got drunk afterwards.

[Auptie]

So -could- this have been something, do you guys think? Or is it an utter shambles. The pictures kind of work my deep thirsting imagination, though it could just be taco's word-flavouring

[Youpi]

I never dared to launch the thing so this is a very cool thread. Thank you for your sacrifice.
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Twitter: @youpi

[Loki Laufeyson]

eagerly anticipating further adventures
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http://lunaticobscurity.blogspot.com/ - newest post: Snezhaja Koroleva (Arcade)
http://lunargarbagehell.blogspot.com/ - newest post: Batman: Digital Justice

[Gironika]

lack of ducks in V-formation with a nice sunset as a backdro itt!

that aside, enjoyed every bit of this. Thanks!
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[Gorblax]

[tacotaskforce]

Granzella will be the topic of a future update, but that's a ways off. At this point in the photolog timeline irem is still hard at work on Zettai Zetsumei Toshi 4 and is eagerly awaiting the sales numbers of Doki Doki Suikoden.

Geinou: I think I know who you're talking about. I don't think she's ever been identified, but I imagine she's someone with an actual job at Sony who was put in these videos because she's young and photogenic. Nearly every week, when Home updates, they have a short video that goes over the highlights of the update (though they focus more on the stuff you can buy than on the new freely accessible content). These videos are just as silly as Home, and I'll link to some of them when they become appropriate. Here's one from January 2011, which has the usual production values but is lacking the current douchebag host.

Auptie: Maybe? I'm not the target audience, so I don't see Home as an effective social tool. Based on how many people I see running through areas just to collect the free rewards I think most people are like me as well. That said Home does have its white whales who spend a lot of money on home, and apparently there is an audience who meets with their friends in Home's Private and Club Spaces. All I can see Home for is the advergaming.

Bonus pics:
A wider view of the winter Central Square.
Some more dumb clutter in my apartment. The food and goldfish came from the irem festival square. You can get the goldfish for free, but you have to buy the fishtank. The beetles were prizes for an easter egg hunt minigame in the RE5 space.
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[zombieman000]

Regrettably, I think the only Irem Home item I ever got was an R9 model. I tried to win Siren t-shirts but kept getting kicked out of the minigame, and got tired of waiting in line.

[Persona]

I never installed Home because it takes up like a zillion gigabytes upon startup/installation. Though if there's reason to, I'm willing to try. Should we have our next SB podcast in the next frontier of PS home??
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[This Machine Kills Fascis]

Yeah, Nintendo should have a sort of unified Animal Crossing universe, uniting all their systems. I really think that could be the new cool thing that people talk about, now that motion control is old hat and probably nobody will be viscerally excited by TWO SCREEEEENS!!!!

But then, I've never understood why the home screen of the DS doesn't feature a cute avatar who tells you your horoscope.

If gamification eventually leads to everything with a screen featuring cute avatars that claim to live inside your appliances, then I'm game.

I'm still waiting for someone to give me the name of that .lzh unpacking program that featured a bunny avatar that hung out in the corner of your screen. So goddamn cute.
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"Godzilla could be anyone."

[Tulpa]

[CubaLibre]

Man this thread rules.

[This Machine Kills Fascis]

[another coma]

hell yes Lainer
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[This Machine Kills Fascis]

You mean Lanier?
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"Godzilla could be anyone."

[tacotaskforce]

TMKF that's what you get for never being in IRC.

So, some good news and some bad news. The good news is that I still have screenshots for Irem's Spelunker and R-type Spaces. The bad news is that I lost the screenshots for their Festival, Beach, and Doki Doki Suikoden Spaces. I also heard that there was a second japan exclusive Spelunker space I never saw. I'll try and find some third party sources for those.


Anyways hello again, and welcome to Sodium One! Sodium One was Home's first proper real we-seriously-mean-it game. I think it's a hybrid of a hover tank shooting gallery and Wipeout-clone, but kind of crumby because everything on Home is kind of crumby. It also has a weird line of clothing that has nothing to do with its futuristic setting at all.


Of course actually playing Sodium One requires you to buy a ship, so what do the people who never spend a dime on Home do? They stomp scorpions! No, really. You step on scorpions and get points that you can use to buy T-shirts. Or buy new shoes that are better at stomping scorpions with. When I took these photos a year ago over a million scorpions had been stomped. We all got a free T-shirt to commemorate the event.


If you're the roleplayer sort (and surprisingly few people I see on Home are) Then Sodium One is a pretty well designed area. It's large and has all kinds of places to get away or meet up, like this bar. Lots of unique architecture too. All in all, for the first area in Home with proper effort, it's not bad.


One of the "Core" areas in Home is the Theater. This was the pre-revamp design, but post revamp it's still pretty much the same. Several theaters all playing streaming video of some kind, like movie trailers, Tester episodes, or Platinum'd, a Home exclusive show about the drama of collecting trophies!

I avoid the Theater whenever possible. (also check out the three guys wearing identical clothing. That's one of the default clothing options, and it, along with the black tanktop+red pants, or just going shirtless, is fairly popular for male avatars)


Unfortunately these photos show another shortcoming of the Home camera: You can't take screenshots of any video screen. They just show up as blanks. This is a shame because the scrolling ads in areas are usually pretty hilarious/horrible, like the one time there were 40 foot tall scrolling ads for adult diaper fetish clothing in the central square. After running into my nemesis I made off for the next area.


Now here's a Space that actually did attract a lot of roleplayers. Maybe they need the moisture to reproduce.


This was the former Speluker HD space, an area that probably saw dozens of times more visitors than the actual game had buyers. It's fairly detailed, and had a few free items too. You could unlock the P1 Spelunker clothes by playing Spelunker HD, but if you wanted any other colors you had to buy them here (IIRC they were around $4 for a full set. irem's items were pricey). This area was also essentially the entire matchmaking mode for Spelunker, and setting up MP games for it is even harder now that it's gone.


Oh no, ghosts! I'm totally unprepared for this situation!


Booji brought up Xi a few posts up, and last year a Xi museum Space was added. Based just on it I still have no idea what Xi was, just that it was apparently "groundbreaking". What the museum lacks in information it makes up for in minigames.


In addition to a text adventure (which I can't show off thanks to that screenshot limitation, but is still pretty cool) there's also a speeder bike game that is the single coolest thing I have seen on Home. Like a RotJ themed version of Hang On trees approach you on the screen in front of your bike and you have to turn to avoid them. However, once the trees reach the edge of the screen they turn into 3D objects and fly past you. It's like some fictional 1980s near future movie arcade machine come to virtual life.


Quick detour back to the Central Square. This "coming soon" Ford Space took nearly a year to finally come out. Wasn't terribly impressive either when it came out.


This Burn Zombie Burn zone kind of clashes with the rest of Home because of its aesthetic, but I do appreciate that Spaces usually retain the aesthetic of the game they came from. It's a simple enough area to get through too, just run through the maze without getting eaten by a zombie and...


...get a free T-shirt.


The final Space for this update will be the Midway. Remember the simple joys of visiting the Carnival, playing the games, laughing at the carnies, and burning through $20 yet only having a stuffed rabbit to show for it because all the games are fixed? Well Sony's done their damnedest to recreate that experience, virtually!


The Midway has about eight games in each Space, and is now up to three separate Spaces too. Each game has its own prize list, and you can even play one random game for free every ten minutes. When playing for free you can only win the first prize on the list, however. If you want the other prizes you have to buy tickets.


Actual, real, disposable tickets. $3 for 50 tickets. The Midway is also the first time that Home's artificial scarcity has shown up in this photolog. This is usually only an issue when a game becomes free, but if the maximum number of players are currently playing a game, then you have to wait until they leave. This usually only applies to the early Home areas, like the old game room and (sadly) the Siren Space, but that doesn't make it any less ludicrous.

The Midway also offers a "free" Personal Space, but every feature of the space is locked off unless you buy a $5 key for it.

This post has gotten way too long, so I'm calling this a good stopping point. Next update I go international!
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[Dark Age Iron Savior]

thread is so great

Spelunker :(

Xi place looks like Deus Ex 2.

what is/was the Siren space like?

[zombieman000]

I don't remember much besides a hospital area that you had to run through without being touched by zombies to get a shirt or some other clothing worn by the characters. There were always long lines you had to stand in before getting another chance since only one or two could play at a time? I don't think it ended up being worth the wait. There were no museum areas or other minigames as far as I can remember, just zombie tag.

[Gorblax]

I would watch an episode of Platinum'd

I hope there's one about a guy descending into madness over the gardening achievement in NieR
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[boojiboy7]

[CubaLibre]

That was me who brought up Xi! >:(

The weird antiseptic white spaces were sort of the visualized "behind the scenes" parts of Home, kind of like the hallways with all the doors in the Matrix sequels. The digital utility areas to support the visible world. Actually the entrance to the main Xi hub was a literal manhole in the ground of the central Home area.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[P1d40n3]

wait

home is on the crossbar thingie?

where?
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[tacotaskforce]

I have very real trouble telling booji and cuba apart.

P1 it's right on top of the store.

Fair warning to anyone who wants to take the plunge into Home themselves: it is the least stable piece of software on the PS3. All but one of my serious system crashes has been caused by Home, and three of those times the PS3 has had to recheck the integrity of the HDD afterwards for fear that it had become corrupted. That might have been where some of my photos went.
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[TheUser]

This is a fantastic thread. Thanks for sharing!

[Rud31]

Thread rules.
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My Hawt Blog Vita Games

THERE ARE DEFINITELY WORSE VIDEO GAME PODCASTS

[diplo]

Yeah, this is great. Getting vibes similar to those I got from the IC Second Life thread.

I guess all that's missing are bipedal urinating horse cocks.

[boojiboy7]

i would do an SB Home meetup thing if i can clear some space on my PS3, just for the heck of it.

[Laurel Soup]

The IC Second Life thread was one of my favorite things.

I love Home's thumbs down emote. When it first came out, I was screwing around on my friend's Home account, and I kept thumbs-downing this dude who was trying to chat up ladies. He eventually got pissed and gave me his address and social security number, inviting me to come and find him in person. All from a string of emotes...
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[tacotaskforce]

So with all this talk of an SB Home meetup, now would probably be the best time to do it. Sony's opening their second annual E3 booth in Home at noon on tuesday, and that's probably the best place to see crowds of people wearing silly costumes. The space will probably be taken down on wensday the week after.

Things to keep in mind:

Home supports voice chat, but I've never used it before.

I have no idea how long it takes to install Home, but expect it to take awhile.

If you log in right now (and they may or may not remove this next week) you can watch the trailer to MIB3 in Home and get a snazzy suit for both male and female avatars. This looks a lot better than anything else you can easily acquire for free. You can also get a beard item if you win a stupid norelco minigame.

You will NEED a north american PSN account. Home is automatically segregated by region.

The next update proper will be either tomorrow, or at the end of next week.
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[secret character]

I explored the E3 area in Home today. I got a bunch of dumb free stuff and witnessed a bunch of people hitting on each other and generally trying to have weird virtual relationships. Now I look like some kind of alien space marine thanks to winning a game of Slay, an okayish strategy board game in the Dust 514 area, which you may or may not need to do a bunch of E3 bullshit to reach.

I'd be up for a meetup in Home with SB people.

[boojiboy7]

ok i will install home soon-ish.

[tacotaskforce]

So this post is only being done four days later than I intended. Also while I said I'd be looking at some of the asian PS Home areas in the last update I'll be saving that for next time. I figured now would be the best time to look at the E3 PlayStation space from this and last year.


Last year was the first time Sony made an E3 booth for Home, and at the time it was a pretty cool space compared to the rest of Home. It's a faithful representation of their real booth, but with fewer games, and none of them playable. I'm going off of memory, but I'm pretty sure you got costume items in return for watching trailers. One of the items was a baby t-rex that could follow you around as a pet, so that's cool. Unfortunately both it and the camera count as active items, so I can't take a photo of him.


Once you got all of the rewards for watching trailers you could go into the "VIP area" and play one level of the then upcoming PS Home game Scribble Shooter. It's a scrolling shooter where all the enemies look like doodles. It was kind of underwelming?


So, overall for E3 2011? The space looked nice, some of the costume rewards were nice, but actually walking around was fairly dull.


For 2012 they really stepped it up. There were twice as many games present (Sadly no Miku), the costume rewards ranged from neat to ludicrous, a special theater streamed the live interviews the PS Blog was doing at the show, and they added a full quest hosted by Christina Lee.


Christina Lee is the host of Pulse, a video that summarizes the updates on the PS Store on a bi-weekly basis. It's... kind of pointless? Regardless Sony seems to think there's a reason to keep publishing it, as they've kept her on a regular basis for the past five years. Before and after each quest you get a video of Lee telling you what you need to go do or what costume item you just recieved.


The quests were something added to the Home revamp last year. I haven't really been paying attention to them, but last week's was marathoning the entirety of Tester 3 in the theater, so they probably aren't anything really exciting. The E3 space's quests came in one of three flavors: collect hovering trinkets, take a photo with a statue, or answer trivia questions.


The trivia questions were barely even trivia. Most of them followed the pattern of:

Q. How Awesome is our game?

1. Awesome
2. So Awesome
3. Epicly Awesome


Every single quest rewarded costume items, and some non-quest activities rewarded items as well. Here I'm wearing a God of War gold chain, Resistance: Burning Skies fireaxe, LOOT swimtrunks, and a single boot from the old Irem beach space. People on Home will likely be cosplaying as psychotic fireaxe weilding Sly Coopers for weeks to come.

The nice thing about the quest is that after you complete it you gain access to both the upper floor of Home previews and the Dust 514 space. The upcoming Home stuff looks really nice, and includes what looks like Home's own version of Sim City Social and another action RPG space. Based on Granzella's RPG space I'm kind of warry of it, but maybe eventually they'll make an action game on Home that doesn't suck. Apparently an update to Aurora is coming too, but I always thought that Aurora was some kind of golf space. Based on the Aurora booth it's some kind of really open ended RPG? I'll have to check it out later.


This E3 also marked the first time I've ever seen a Home Guide! There used to be scrolling ads in the central square always suggesting we ask Guides about new and upcoming Home content, but I suspected they were perhaps a sly joke, or a myth. Sadly they don't have any magic powers, and like all community managers who pour their hearts and souls into improving the community that forms around commercial products, they don't get paid.

Another first: someone asked to have a picture taken with me. They also thought I was a lego man, but I'll take what I can get.


One weird thing about this year's E3 was that there was a store kiosk, and things for sale. Just for this one week Lockwood was offering a few specially colored variants of their items. That robot and lion are available as costumes and pets, respectively. They cost $9.99 each. I saw one guy with both.


The Dust 514 space is kind of sparce and seems to be used mainly to get you to watch a bunch of videos and then beg for a beta invite (I got one before this space went live. The game's alright). Off to one side, however, is what has become my favorite game in Home.


I don't know much about board games, so Slay could be based on something that already exists. It even supports multiplayer, with any combination of six people or CPUs. You start spread out over a map of hexes, and every two adjacent hexes you control are considered owned. In owned areas you have a base that will acumulate wealth; one for every hex connected to that base. Wealth is used to purchase, and maintain, units who can take opposing areas and defeat any weaker unit. Connecting two owned areas will merge them into one while cutting an area in half will cause a new base to appear in the cut off area, and destroying a base will cause all stockpiled wealth to be lost. The clincher is that units have to be paid in upkeep from the area they currently occupy, so if you can cut off an expensive unit from its base by claiming the tiles behind it you can cause it to desert on the end of its turn.

Strategy games are what Home does best, so I hope this space isn't just seasonal and that it sticks around.


As a bonus, here's that unimpressive Ford space. It's unimpressive, and the only rewards were a free t-shirt and car keys.
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[Gorblax]

http://blog.eu.playstation.com/2012/09/04/playstation-home-out-of-this-world/

[TXTSWORD]

Is this why people say blood potion or did the icon come after the popularity of blood potion?

Does "blood potion" mean "front page this please"?

What, other than blood, is in the "potion"? Or is there no blood and the potion is FOR blood?

[tacotaskforce]

I really wish I had an option of creating short page threads. I want to make another update, but I really do not want three image dumps on a single page.
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[Gorblax]

Let's just talk about Sony until we get to page 2!
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[Gironika]

the thing is that I'll always remember home as the last thing that irem did (which isn't true, but just can't help feeling that way) and what a weird thing it was.
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