Wierdest darn thing I’ve ever seen …

I got tired of waiting for my system to update with Playstation*Home, so I signed into the PS3 internet browser and went to the PS3 Blog … At the bottom, where headlines flash by, I clicked on the one that says, "Home now available!" It took me to a blogpost about how I could … at this very minute … after reading the blogpost … restart my system and Home would be available in the PSNetwork blade of the menu.

Sure enough … It was necessary, this whole time, to visit the blog first?! Wth?

Well, 77MB later and a super fast install, I was ready to go!

So I downladed Home, created my character with the very, very, VERY limited items available and entered my Home … Very bland and uninteresting. Graphics-wise, beautiful … but boring. I can pick up and move furniture, rearrange my house, put stuff in and take stuff out (chairs, tables, a lamp and a footstool to start with, that’s all you get.) Oh, and you can change to 8 preset wallpapers. I’m not sure if each house is unique or they’re all corner balcony views of the ocean …

I went to visit another section of the community, ala Second Life but much easier to navigate. I went to the Mall, which required a wait time while an additional 32MB of data was downloaded. I’m assuming that each section requires additional downloads and the 77MB is simply your house and the character creator as well as interface … Lotta people walking around not knowing what the heck to do. I walked into a store to see about buying some furniture for my bland house. I click on decorations and wait about a minute for it to load the first time. There is 1 decoration available for download … a model fighter jet you can set on a table … I go to buy it and realize … wait a minute … this piece of digital property costs .49-cents! Yup, to put an image of a model fighter jet in my house, I have to pay Sony .49-cents. So I back out of that meny quickly and move on.
No other stores were open and the only video playing was Veronica Belmont and some other woman advertising Quore. There were a few advertisement boards scattered about for the new PS3 keypad. Other than that, I was bored and ready for bed. Tonight, I may check out the movie theater, lord knows how big a download I’ll have to wait for on that one …

Over all, as far as first impressions go … I’m disappointed, let down and disgruntled. This is the savior of the PS3? Hmm … Maybe Microsoft’s treatment of Silver players isn’t so bad after all … they do go for content over lavish looks, for the most part.