Firstly, Home is only accessible through private keys sent to e-mails in a sort of open Beta in that they are just giving them out freely to anyone, not on PSN downloads, PS3 on-time or oldest registrations as can be seen by the OP’s presence in the Beta at the same time as me (launch day owner).

I can only see this as a way to both stress test the online servers and to test the update for user consoles, I know this is the method Microsoft used for the NXE a week before launch, it’s much safer than launching it and bricking a percentage of consoles to be repaired at a cost to them – better safe than sorry. It’s not my favourite method, but with so much going on now it is understandable.

Now as I’m sure some people here will know, I actually turned down a chance to be in this Beta in September 2007 when I was speaking to George Bain at a conference where he assured those in the room that HOME was ‘just around the corner’ and as a result I opted to wait for a final version as I am not a fan of Beta’s at all – I prefer to see things in their full glory. Looking back at it I wish I had though.

Sony have now managed to get HOME to a lot of people less than 2 weeks after Microsoft launched NXE – coincidence? I think not. Many people in the Sony fan camp have claimed that Microsoft have only copied the ideas set out by both Nintendo and Sony in the NXE, duplicating Nintendo’s ‘Mii’ characters and a lot of inspiration from HOME, but I’ll come back to that.

HOME is downloadable via the Sony PSN’s Playstation Store where you redeem a code, much in the same way you would download stuff for Xbox360, the download for HOME itself is 77mb, not as large as I was expecting and thankfully, due to it not being widely available (or as widely as it could be should I say) it didn’t take too long to download. Here’s where the ‘surprises’ set in though. As soon as you open it you are told to download another file for 30mb… not difficult, but definitely an annoyance as they could quite easily have just had a 100mb file with both downloads in, in the first place. So I downloaded the next file and went to install it.

When installing you are drawn through the regular run of the mill things, agreeing to terms and conditions and the such, but this is where the biggest shock of all came in to it, HOME itself requires an almighty 3,000mb+ of reserved Hard-Drive space. Now I know many people will argue that Sony’s HDD’s are upgradeable to any 2.5″ medium, this is not the point, the vast majority of users will be on default HDD’s and worse, a lot of those users will be on smaller HDD’s than the 60gb Sony blessed us with at launch, many users only have 20gb HDD.

Again, I realise this is the case with Xbox360, however Xbox360 loses 7gb due to backwards compatibility, a larger chunk, I acknowledge that fact, but where Sony loses out here is that a LOT of games now require mandatory installations before playing. Metal Gear Solid 4 requires 5.1gb (per Act), Grand Theft Auto IV requires 3.3gb, Gran Turismo 5 Prologue is 5.9gb and Bioshock is 4.8gb. For those of you who don’t want to work that out, for those 4 games (and 4 of the most popular games on the console I add), that’s a combined HDD install of 19.1gb for those 4 games. Add into that Playstation HOME and you have 22.1gb of HDD usage… a shame for the 20gb users out there… and there are quite a lot of them. Not very clever really and Sony’s choice of Blu-Ray really isn’t looking like the smart choice for games media now…

But, that’s all hypothetical that those users have all those games installed (though there are many, many more games with large installs, I merely named 4 of the 5 best on the console that require them), and are playing them at the same time. Thankfully, having a 60gb HDD it wasn’t such an issue and as someone who buys his multi-format games on Xbox360 I obviously didn’t have much space taken up by installs (only Little Big Planet and Metal Gear Solid 4) so I cracked on with it. After installing and booting you are given a create-a-character-esque screen for you to develop your online HOME avatar in. For those who haven’t seen it, HOME’s style is much more in keeping with reality than the fantasy, anime stylings of both Mii’s and NXE Avatars.

The creation tools are very similar to those found in EA’s games such as Fight Night Round 3 or Skate, where you can develop the look of your characters face by using the analogue sticks to give accurate creation in minor features, it’s very impressive, sadly for me that’s where it ended in the Create-a-Character ended for me though. Sony, for 2 years of development that the public have known of have released HOME to much anticipation with the incredible option choices of five shirts for the character to wear, five sets of trousers, two sets of glasses and very few options in the other catagories, that for me is simply not good enough at all. It may be a Beta and indeed Sony may add more when it hits full open release, but for 2 years wait I was expecting 5 to 10 times that. The biggest annoyance of all this however is that I don’t think any of these items were in the original download as every time you highlighted over the icon for another item it would take up to 10 seconds per shirt/accessory/shoes etc.. I hate little pauses or waits, certainly on something as simple as a change of features or clothing.

So we enter the living space, a lovely waterside property which in the real world would cost quite a lot (although there is a lack of a bathroom or bedroom… hmm ). Your navigation here extends simply from the 1 room you are offered which has a coffee table, 2 settee’s, 2 comfy chairs, a table and 3 school chairs and 2 lamps by the door. It’s sparse. To brighten up the experience you can walk out onto the balcony where you are greeted by a rather impressive view of yachts, hills and water and a lovely relaxing sea-side sound of seagulls which was nice. In this room you can pick up your furniture and move them around giving you all the options you want (height, rotation and movement). In this you can see a lot of possibilities for sure and you could make a rather nice house, but I’m also sure you will be paying for the pretty good stuff (both in your house and on your person). I moved a few tables and chairs around, flicked the lights on and off and that was pretty much it, although I did do the ‘Running Man’ dance on the balcony which made me giggle.

This is where HOME irked me again… It recommended I go to one of the 4 available locations, I opted for the shopping center, with a couple of quid in my PSN wallet I thought I might invest in something different. I went to leave only to be told I need to download something else, another 30mb file. I downloaded it, this sadly was not quick. 5 minutes later it alerted me it had downloaded, so I thought I’d try the other places, as before, all of these required further downloads to a total over 100mb. Why oh why were all these locations, HOME and its update not included in the original download? It would only amount to 300mb, nothing in a climate where 1gb is the average for a demo, and it would be an all-in-one solution.

I only traveled to 2 locations all told, firstly the Shopping Mall which on first impressions certainly looked like an American mall and sounded authentic with some very nice sound effects. All around where other online users who sadly more often than not looked like the creature from The Abyss rather than 3D users as it took an age to load them in. Also, chat text is often used with a GUI keyboard used to input, however there are preset questions or statements such as “Hello” or “Where are you from?” but as has been my experience in Playstation games online in the past, these two saying in particular were being spammed all too often by too many people meaning those of us who didn’t mind talking were often swamped with spam – a shame and the obvious downside to preset speech. In the mall were several shops offering different ranges, from clothing to furniture and even whole new houses, the downside was that not one single shop actually sold anything – there is literally nothing to buy in the Beta. The positives were how games were advertised, many billboard posters were there for PSN games such as Flow, or retail games such as Gran Turismo 5 Prologue or Resistance 2 – the nicest of all touches was on the upper floor where there was a large video screen playing a trailer for Motorstorm 2: Pacific Rift, which, when approached would play the sound, an excellent touch – an amusing side part of which was that I set my character to dance to the music resulting in several people also joining in, certainly got a few ‘lols’, which was nice and with interaction that looked so natural and so well implemented this was well done.

The second location I chose was just outside the Shopping Center where you again saw people walking all over, I entered the cinema complex which teased me in with a poster for Resistance 2. I walked around and saw an open door with the words “Speed runs” above it, curiously I entered the room which looked like any other cinema room, keeping the authenticity there whilst a loading bar was clearly loading any video I wished to see on the screen. This was cripplingly slow I must say, but I was intrigued as to what “Speed Runs” was, so I stuck with it through it’s 15 minute download only to be greeted with a movie trailer for ‘Pineapple Express’, which was a shame as I had spent 15 minutes waiting for a download to complete for a movie that doesn’t interest me. I’m hoping this was a glitch and certainly that the speeds perk up.

By this point the cripplingly slow speeds and complete lack of anything to do within HOME caused me to quit and go and play something else.

Now this is where my original point about the Sony fan camp is going. They all claim NXE is a duplication of what Sony are trying to do, building Avatars as virtual representations of yourself which can be decorated with items bought from the store or won in games, and in theory I can see the similarities, however in practice it’s very different and down to ignorance on their behalf. Firstly, Microsoft have delivered a full package deal, it’s an Avatar system as well as a whole new Operating System front-end, this is not the case with HOME and if it were I feel we wouldn’t see it til Playstation 4 as Sony are incredibly slow at developing software. Secondly, HOME has been in development for 2 years yet Microsoft managed to get theirs out in half the time, they skipped the Spring update and only released 1 major update in a year – the NXE, which we only saw images of around 3 months before it hit, a sign of Microsoft’s power in the Software market I guess. Not only have Microsoft developed a more complex system by overhauling it’s whole front-end and making all settings from the console useable in-game, which let us not forget, it took Sony over a year to get the XMB remotely useable in-game and for me, it’s still not good enough, but they’ve also delivered far more creative options in its development, I have a wider selection of outfits to choose from, more hair styles, more accessories and other settings too.

Sony have billed HOME as the competition to Xbox Live who only the incredibly ignorant would claim that there was little in it. What Sony have offered in HOME is a very pretty online social network, a 3D world which is nicely designed, navigateable, has living areas which are modifiable and areas in the world for friends to meet up, watch trailers for movies and games, play Chess (the only option at the moment) and wander through shops buying items for your character or house, much like you would in real-life. It’s all rather well realised, and I can’t deny that, but will it have longevity? I’m not overly sure.
Sony have said you can get a group of friends from your friends list, group them together in HOME and launch a game as a party which sounds great, however Microsoft are already offering this now and you don’t have to traipse around a 3D world to do it, you can simply do it in 2 clicks on NXE and in a world where speed is key I feel if changes aren’t made to what Sony are offering HOME will fall on it’s ass and become a chore to many outside of the young teenage market who want to spend time in chat-rooms… but even then will there be many girls for the boys to act all alpha to? I don’t see it.

HOME does undoubtedly have potential and the could make a really vast landscape with it over the years (as it promises in the installation of it), but unless they create something that appears much more seamless then it all seems a little pointless. There are much more important things that the PSN needs – firstly the ability to see what users are up to and the ability to message them over the Internet in the same way you can do over http://www.xbox.com – something I know everyone on my friends list does regularly. Another would be the way to compare games and trophies with users without waiting for their PSN gamercard to load (again, takes between 30-60 seconds) for that and then to compare games it takes another 30-60 minutes… very annoying as I know I can view my friends profile and compare games over Xbox Live in less than 5 seconds, considerably less than the 2 minutes it often takes me on PSN. Thirdly, there needs to be more interaction between HOME and games, for which, bar advertising around the place, I saw none. Nothing linked to what games I have played or completed – something simple like pictures in my apartment of games I own would be nice, something simple to acknowledge the fact that HOME is there to complement games and not to be a separate program, as it stands it might as well be any old chat room.

As I said, there is massive room for improvement but also a world of possibilities, I just hope Sony don’t screw yet another thing up by taking an age to do the most simple of things, the major problem of which is that HOME is intended to compete with Xbox Live, but it still doesn’t come close to what Xbox Live was offering before the NXE for interactivity, speed or usability, and that for me is potentially the killer blow for HOME.