home

    Playstation Home may be free, but that doesn't mean that it is excused from its problems, of course there aren't that many to start with. You start off creating your own character, but we were surprised with the limited amount of shirts there are. You can customize many parts to your character even during gameplay. So if for some reason, you decide that you aren't happy with your outfit, all you need to do is warp to your wardrobe and change it. You can change things like height, body fat and other things like how big your head is. The character customization is nice, but could've included some more options from the start. You are able to buy clothes from the mall, and they are free. Still, I would've liked to see more customization from the beginning.

    Once you have fine tuned all aspects of your character to your likening, you are required to download all of the areas. These downloads do not begin until you try and enter their respective areas and you can download them in background. Some area must be downloaded via the world map, it shows all the current maps in Home. The game spaces are great to have. For example, at the Resident Evil 5 game space, you can play a minigame exclusive to RE5 owners, as it requires you to have the disc in the Playstation 3. While you wait for some of these area to finish downloading, you can chat with other players or add furniture and wallpaper to your house, if you haven't. The furniture you can add is limited to couches, chairs, tables lamps, etc. None of these look out of the ordinary however you are free to place them in any area you wish, including on top of each other. I personally thought all the wallpapers, at the time of this writing, were ugly so I have kept mine the standard color. You are able to buy new furniture, but as GameInformer said, you are buying virtual furniture for your virtual home, but with your own money. Sorry Sony, I don't care how cheap it is, I refuse to buy it. Same with the character customization, I will assume that Sony will add more "free" options as more time has passed.

    The main purpose of Home is to meet new people, maybe from down the road or across the world. There is text based chat system. Sony was so generous to give us the basic greetings like "Hello" or "Where are you from?" From what we have experienced, there really are no jerks and Home seems to have a good community. A real killer is that you must to wait in line to play arcade games or bowling. Because of these lines, we were unable to give a full report on all the mimigames, but we have played some. The bowling is kind of frustrating, a cursor will will go from all the sides and you press a button when you want to to stop. It is simply not fun, especially coming off Wii Sports bowling. Granted, the Playstation 3 does not have the motion controls that make Wii Sports fun, but I just wish Sony did more to make me want to play it. The mall features the newest episodes of Pulse, a Sony run news show that gives updates on the world of Playstation. This is nice to watch since the other way is downloading it, but I have noticed some annoying parts were it has to load, which is nonexistent if you choose to download. Directly behind that is chess. There is nothing special to it, you can play with a friend using one controller or play with another Home user.

    Home is a free download and a great way to pass an hour, however it is far from perfect and hopefully Sony will fix the problems. Even though there aren't that many, the ones that are there are big enough to present a big problem to Home players throughout the world.-Brandon