Sector 9 at Home...Playstation Home that is

Sector 9 has been treated really well by Sony in recent weeks. Our coverage of PS Tour 2008 @ Voodoo Fest has been approved, and we've gotten our hands on Little Big Planet and Playstation Home. While the Voodoo Coverage will be hitting our blog around Halloween and LBP hands on should "air" this weekend, i have here a very detailed look at Home straight from the current stage of very closed Beta right here, right now. So all you Home and PS3 junkies, and anyone that is curious just how good/bad Home is hit the jump for all the goodies you can handle on Home.

NOTE: I apologize for the crappy iPhone photos. For some odd reason i did not think of any better way to get some HD stuff for you.

Playstation Home is a social networking oriented graphic UI/video game that also serves as a gateway into PSN, and it does all that better than anything you've seen before. Basic premise behind your participation in home is to create an avatar (or 9 which is the total number of open slots for avatars) and enter the world of PS Home to interact, shop, decorate, get informed, or find friends to launch into games with. So lets start from the top. First thing you will do is like i said create an avatar of yourself. Home offers an incredible amount of customization option for the character models. If you are not interested playing with the detailed grid system you can always choose some of the presets, or the basic handful of character models. To better create., or at least set up your avatar for further detailing Home allows you to customize every aspect of you head/face going as far as crow's feet around your eyes, or forehead wrinkles. Furthermore you work on your body through all of the expected aspects of body creation. While in the creation stage you will be choosing your initial outfit, and in beta offerings are really not much. One thing that is missing and i thought would be one of the first elements to be included is the PS Eye facial upload. I did think of a few reasons they couldn't do it, but than again a cosmically huge project like this should be able to handle something so...basic.

Once you are done with this Home loads up your Homespace (read: your apartment) as empty as it is. You do have a few option for home decor, but again very much like with the clothes these are nothing to behold. View is stunning from your balcony but there is nothing going on in the house so you set off to get some shopping done. This leads you through the door and into the vast and visually impressive world of Playstation Home. Your arrival location is called the Main Square or Central Square and it is a general area in which you can hang out, get basic info of other locations, and use it generally as a gateway to everything else. Everything else as of now entitles a shopping mall with only a few stores, a movie theater playing previews (at least in beta it does, and sadly it was PAIN: Amusement park the night i started writing this), gamespace, or back to your place. With exception of an optional Summer Home that concludes the list of playable/visitable locations in the current build of Home.

Central square is by a longshot the most populated area, and while there is not much to do gamers will always find something. In the case of Home that is dancing next to a giant jukebox-like thing, dancing in the main square, following people around, and hitting on your girlfriend. Of course this last one was purposely setup by me and my girlfriend with a task of playing jokes on other Home testers. Sad thing is that you cannot see the face of the other guy after he has spent 30 minutes hitting on a girl, and just when he asks her to get to his/hers homespace a guy answers on the headset saying "yeah baby, lets go to your place" (screenshots supplemented). While on the note of player interaction i have to say that communication options are fantastic. You can of course type, use emotes, body English, and the mic. Mic is push-to-talk, and once you talk it is based on the proximity to the speaker. Meaning that is an open convo that is distance limited very much as in the real world. Unfortunately only 1 in 15 people used their mic to communicate, and trust me my girlfriend approached everyone and their mother so i did get a pretty accurate feel for this one.

Mall as of now offers just a few basic stores for clothes, furniture, accessories, and random goodies. All items are free in beta, but the selection is very limited. At best you will in end have 2 sets of furniture and 2 sets of clothes as everything else looks like crap. Not graphically but just simply poor design. Biggest drawback in the mall is that the shops are not real. You simply walk up to the door and the screen switches to a thumbnail shopping interface. Now i am not saying that there should be a way to reenact a real shopping experience but you should at least be able to browse the store, and walk up to the clerk before triggering the shopping interface.

All these locations are connected with a very interesting loading system. Each of the location requires a download one per login. That download will save the location temporarily on the HDD which will allow you to switch locations from there on with just a short 5-10 second load time. In beta, considering that there are total of 6 locations this does not seem to be all that useful but at the point you have many more locations it will make a world of difference. Additionally this allows you to shorten the load times greatly by picking only the locations you will use on a particular visit to download.

One of my favorite features of PS Home is the in-game main menu. This is represented through a PSP like interface. Well more or less it is a virtual PSP which your avatar will actually pull out of his/her pocket and really act like you are using it when viewed by other players. For you however the main menu is the PSP XMB, and it offers many options. You can check your wardrobe, your purchased properties, get tips and hints, customize your in-home PSP, customize your communications, and launch into games from it just to mention the main choices.

While there is really not much to do in Home at the moment except for hang out the app has mad potential. Movie theater for example could be use to premier game videos, or have unique Sony sponsored movie viewings and other exclusive content. Opportunities like this are everywhere in Home and i hope that "world wide" events become a major part of Home because without those i have feeling it may become a video gaming version of Myspace where after first 6 months all you'll be doing in Home is adding things to your avatar and your homespace to show it off to you friends while you are farting around the central square area.

Of course undeniable the game launch option if done right could and will be one of the staples of Home. Having such an amazing space to kill 15-20 minutes while waiting on the rest of your SOCOM, KZ2 or whatever else team to get only sure beats the hell out of staring into a vanilla group screens that most of the games offers. All in all Home is shaping up amazingly. Visuals are stunning, there are plenty of things to do if you spend your time sparingly, and the potential from massive social, interactive, gamer community based events is endless and could make Home a history changing application.

That is all i got for now, and as updates come around and there is more stuff to talk about you can surely expect us to bring them straight to you.