[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!
_________________

[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.
_________________

[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!
_________________

[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.
_________________

[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.
_________________

[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.
_________________

[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.
_________________

[tacotaskforce]

[tacotaskforce]

Oh my, one of my abandoned projects.

Yeah, I have enough pics on my HDD for two more updates, at least. And I have too much time to myself tomorrow.
_________________

[tacotaskforce]

Like the PSN Store, Home is segregated into four major regions: The Americas, Europe, Japan, and Hong Kong. Each region has mostly the same areas, but each also has unique ones for games/movies/whatever that aren't available in other regions. Japan/HK and US/EU also have radically different Central Plazas.

The Asian one is HUGE. I imagine they condensed it for the west to make Home seem more populated, but the Japanese square, as large as it is, usually has a fair number of people milling about. Many will be in full costume, posing for the others who are taking screencaps. After the Home 2.0 rollout the Japanese spaces remained unchanged, probably because Japan doesn't really care for Home games but loves Home costumes.

These shots came from new years 2010, when the whole central square was done up for the holiday. I didn't make it back there in 2011 or 2012 to see if they did this again. The next time I went to the japanese Home they were advertising Macross F with a life-size Valkyrie.

This is an area exclusive to the HK Home, a fact the room's description states several times in bold letters. See, you may be paying a premium for games and waiting months later for them to come out and there may only be like three total Cantonese language games on the PS Store, but we still care about you so much we gave you your own Home space.

I've never seen another soul in this space. You can play chess though.

Here's the only irem space to survive the company's purge of all evidence they were ever a respectable developer of games that people liked. It's not large, just half an alley with the pachinko parlor, a clothing store, and a yakisoba joint, but it looks about as nice as most of their other spaces.

No minigames or rewards either, which all of their other spaces did have. I suppose their pachinko fans are used to paying out the nose for everything.

And here's where we get sad again when we remember irem did cool stuff once. This R-Type zone was also exclusive to asian territories, but like all HK spaces it's been translated completely into english. You could wander around the hangar and bridge, check out the store to buy ship statues or R-Type games, or play the space's minigame. Sadly the Home update that allowed you to take screenshots while playing a minigame came long after these spaces were delisted.

If you want to see what it was like you could PM Simon Belmont. After he finishes weeping he'll send you a youtube link of the R-9 flying through rings like it was Superman 64.

The reward for flying through those rings, however, was this rad ass kimono and spaceship hat combo.

Next stop: Toro Town. I think this space uses all the same assets as Weekly Toro Station, and although you can't go inside any of the houses it still looks nice. It even has information on all the Toro characters so that you can amaze your friends with Toro trivia. You can also take a picture with the always photogenic Toro.

I only found out this week that Weekly Toro Station is going to be closing soon. I'm not sure when; an article on siliconera says march but the program itself says next week. I have a ton of screenshots from that too, so I'll write up a bit for it next time.

The last of my irem shots, this was the infamous Semifinalist Fantasia, or what was left of it anyways. I remember seeing shots of a town and beach, but back when I went looking all I could find was this castle siege map. If you ran down to the monsters you'd activate the minigame, and you could earn money by defeating monsters. You could then spend that money on weapons, armor, and items, all of which you could wear as clothing on your avatar. There were also very few items available when I looked, and all of them fairly expensive. It was possible to defeat a few enemies with the starter equipment, however, so with enough tenacity you could purchase high level equipment without have paid anything. This is a strategy Granzella would later reconsider for their games.

This Namco arcade space used to be exclusive to asia, but some time ago they rolled it out worldwide. They even left the im@s drink machines, which lead to dozens, perhaps tens of dozens, of potential western im@s fans clinging to their false hopes in vain. After winning a possibly random skillgame the vending machine will spit out im@s sodas for your apartment or im@s costume pieces. I've seen people running around in a full set (and you will too when I get to my Dead Island image set) but those seem to come up very rarely.

That's enough for this update. Next time: Japan's PlayStation Home For Cats!
_________________

[tacotaskforce]

I am slowly discovering that the worst part of the current Home is how hard it is to take screenshots of. There's a really nice looking Journey Home space that I can't take any screenshots of because the entire space is considered a minigame. It also doesn't paint a particularly appealing portrait of of the game since Home supports neither jumping nor running.
_________________

[tacotaskforce]

They just did it in a standard theater room, not a custom space. It seems like in the west they'll only make custom spaces for E3.
_________________

[tacotaskforce]

Considering how my PC can't run much more than youtube I don't think it would be possible for me to do that. Doing some documentation of all those freemium MMOs out there would be fun, though.
_________________

[tacotaskforce]

Released at almost the same time as PlayStation Home, Weekly Toro Station is basically the exact same thing, but with cats. This was not the first nor will it be the last time Sony has multiple internally developed services that serve the same purpose.


In a few ways Toro Station is better than PS Home. It has plenty of ludicrous costume and decoration options, but unlike PS Home its possible to show off your costume and the decorations in your own personal space to complete strangers. Toro Station also has new weekly content that people who don't give a damn about its virtual world can still enjoy.


Weekly Toro Station starts out with Toro being forcibly evicted from the house she lived in during Everyday Toro by you, the PSN account owner. Out on her own, Toro puts up a cardboard wall in an empty lot and begins hosting Weekly Toro Station in the hopes that you will be entertained enough to buy her a new house. That house costs $8 a month, by the way.


This is Toro's lot as it looked the last time I logged on, decorated with items I've gotten from some of the weekly segments. SEGA and small publishers like Gust and Aquire were usually the best at giving away free stuff, while companies like Konami and Bamco never gave away a damn thing without making you pay for it. Starting on the left I have a 7th Dragon 2020 standee, a Siren New Translation poster, an Atelier Totori poster, a Valkyria 3 figurine, a gamebox for Little Battlers, another Siren poster, art from Nomura and whoever does Blaz Blu's designs, and a third Siren poster. They gave away a ton of free Siren stuff. This was what my hovel looked like the first day I logged onto Toro Station back during new years 2010. I think those are all new years cards from all of the Toro supporting cast.


Every week there would be new segments, and most of them can be watched by free users. The main one is always about a new video game, like Dynasty Warriors 7 here. In these segments Toro, Kuro, and some of the supporting cast will either put on a play based on the game, interview characters from the game, or both. Despite having limited resources they usually manage pretty well, and I wish I knew enough japanese to understand them.


In addition to that Toro and Kuro would also go around to tourist attractions around Japan or interview pop stars. All these segments would even use music from the games or artists. Finally there would be shorter segments where you could see short bits about some new show coming out or some new thing you could buy in the game.


Every once in awhile there'll be a really great free item, like this Valkyrie costume, but mostly they just give you coins for buying stuff.


Purchasing decorations for Toro's home is done via the Myaile Department Store, although there's not much you can access with a free account. Every item on that list with a green creditcard requires a subscription to be able to purchase. And if you were hoping to pick up some Miku gear for your home well you're flat out of luck because you can't just buy those.


You have to go to the arcade and get them the old fasioned way: via a capsule machine.


These also require a subscription to purchase. What doesn't require a subscription are the arcade machines themselves; hell, they even pay you. If you win. And the pay out is so low it would take you about an hour to get enough coins to get one try at one of the free capsule machines. And the pay out on those is even worse.


Still, the games are kind of fun. They're video poker, snake, bowling, kart racing, a scrolling shooter, and more! (three more). I'm... really bad at bowling.


Beyond that you'll have to find your fun from user generated stuff. First up is the Nyavatar Collection, where you can see the effort other people put into their furry personas. These cats are much better dressed than the majority of PS Home people I've seen.


After that You can go wandering around random players' front yards. I've seen a lot of weird stuff going through here, and I didn't take screenshots of half of it. The shrink ray is a pretty popular fixture for yards because it lets people cram even more crap in there. And then some people just plaster posters over every valid surface. I wonder if perhaps this is what most Otaku houses would look like unrestrained by physics or sense.


Sadly Weekly Toro is coming to an end now, and seems like it'll be shut down entirely in June. I imagine a similar fate will befall Home one day too, so this is the message I leave for future generations so that they know we were here.


Toro, meanwhile, will be moving over to Friend Network on the Vita, which sounds like it's a Facebook app version of Animal Crossing. I think she's going to do just fine.


Next time: The DEATH & REBIRTH of PlayStation Home!
_________________

[tacotaskforce]

Bonus! I couldn't really find a place to put it in, but I love Toro Station's 'technical difficulties' sign.


_________________

[tacotaskforce]

Just so you know i have enough screenshots on my PS3 to make about four more updates, but my PS3 is now in Chico while my living situation is in flux, so any new releases will not be happening in the forseeable future.
_________________

[tacotaskforce]