Thursday, 29 October 2009

• Home is Where the Heart Isn't

  So, I may have accidentally lied to you previously about the nature of my next blog, but it is purely on the basis of inspiration! Awful, awful, inspiration.
  
  Hold on to that thought, I am downloading the central hub of my post again.
  
  Downloading
  
  Downloading
  
  Downloading
  
  Downloading
  
  Installing
  
  Installing
  
  Loading
  
  Loading
  
  Loading
  
  So although it's not like making fun of Playstation Home is a freaky, new phenomena, you cannot quite capture the pure rage and agony brought upon by playing this mistake of an application. There was a more general interest, of course, in playing Metal Gear Solid 4, which I partook in far more than usual, which is great, but I had a strong curiosity in the whole Home thing. I guess it mostly started with the question, "Is Home still in Beta?" Which has been the case for over a year I believe. The answer is yes, by the way. I wouldn't want to have worked so hard on a project that honestly should have been quite ambitious but turned into a flaming pile of curds and whey that only total resetting of the entire model would fix, and in turn, respectably title it a, "Full game," or wherever they're heading with this when it comes out of Beta. Which is probably never.
  
  So where do I start? How about the beginning? I'm not quite sure what I'd call the loading of Home itself. Antagonizing? Mental shitstorm? Plain ol' regular frustrating? Let's call it long. And not like, "Me love you long time." Let's just put it this way; within say, 5 minutes of, "Play," I think I had the thing going for about 40 minutes. That sounds like an over-dramatic exaggeration, but it's not. Part of the problem was that you had to download the central hub before it loaded. Isn't that supposed to be a part of the, I dunno, program you downloaded? Then, I must take some blame on the whole time thing, I decided I had wanted to leave the central hub to check out other areas of Home. In this case, the theater, which I also had to download and install before I could leave the central hub to go there. My bad! I knew I should have just enjoyed my experience in my limited box, looking at ads for all things Playstation [including a floating, giant PSP Go that I could not walk under] and having such intellectual exchanges of words with similarly intellectual people.
  
  [Alright, to be fair, I purposefully did not even try real communication, as my foray into Home was, over all, just a huge excuse for me to say, "What you sayin?" followed shortly after by, "That's jokes." It's become a meme which is ALL THE RAGE in Toronto Ontario. Yeah, everyone here is saying it. Am I serious? How will you know?!]
  
  During my time in the theater, I ALMOST decided to see one of the, "Movies," there, but opted out when it would have downloaded more things. What could I expect, coming from a game that downloads all it's locations separately? It was really just movie/game trailers it looked like anyways. Couldn't this have made an excellent opportunity for Sony to hire people to make some hilarious short films or something? To play in the Home exclusively? I think that could have been potentially pretty awesome. Turns out, awesome and Home are not at all possible to be synonymous. Curses. Looking at the posters in the theater is also pretty hilarious in itself, because they couldn't have simply made the posters high-quality image files, but instead they have it so you are looking at the poster as if you're Home avatar was looking at it; and it looks like they need glasses more than I do. It's more like someone tried to paint the picture the poster is trying to be, used water-colours exclusively, and then stopped putting effort in right away. ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?!
  
  The characters are nothing short of ugly. To be perfectly fair, I'm probably not allowed to make a huge generalization about the character creator because I didn't take the time to play around with it [my patience had been tested enough, "Playing," this, let alone going through the intricate system of creating a character that I found that I liked enough], so I was essentially playing the female Ronald McDonald, which I did not stop to comment on about 50 times over. I kinda figured even if the horny male population of Playstation 3 owners who were wasting their time on Home were generally going to go out of their way to hit on all them, "Girls," [I am of course making reference to the acronym G.I.R.L., Guy in Real Life], that my image of a female Ronald McDonald would probably save me from serious virtual consideration.
  
  How can I sum all this up? I think I will end things with words from Penny Arcade's Tycho: "Here is everything you need to understand about Home, if you should accidentally launch it from your XMB: press and hold the Playstation button in the center of your Dual-Shock or Sixaxis controller. From the menu that appears, select Quit."

  • 7:55 PM
  • 34 Views
  • 2 eProps
  • 3 Comments