PlayStation Home: Serial Killer Edition

My Default Playstation Home Avatar
My Default Playstation Home Avatar

PlayStation Home came out not too long ago. Penny Arcade pretty much said what needs to be said about it, but I had to try it myself. Naturally the first thing you do is create your character from a randomized (I hope) default character.

To the left is the default character that I got.

Sony appears to be targeting the coveted 18-25 male Caucasian skinhead/serial killer demographic. I’m kind of surprised that they didn’t filter the default characters to avoid characters that appeared obviously threatening/defective. If this guy showed up at my front door, I’d call the cops.

Naturally, I ended up tweaking him to try and make him freakier, but honestly, what I ended up with was less terrifying. He resembled a creepy real life version of Robbie Rotten.

He stood out nicely compared to all the cookie cutter people on Home, but nobody really cared. In fact, it was hard to communicate with people or interact with the world at all. The loading times were ludicrous. The difference between last gen and this gen is that you can let things load in the background while you stare at the room you’re stuck in. Why would Sony spend millions of dollars and years of time on something like this?

Does anyone else get the feeling that big game projects don’t have fun on their agendas?

Author: Ben Garney

See https://bengarney.com/ and @bengarney for details.

17 thoughts on “PlayStation Home: Serial Killer Edition”

  1. I spent about 15 minutes on Google Image Search trying to find an actual serial killer/ax murderer that looked as scary or scarier than this guy, and I couldn't.

  2. Finally got PS Home to run tonight after about 10-15 retrys. I cannot believe how misguided this product is. Everything from the initial concept to the execution. The art is an abysmal conglomeration of unimaginative, uncanny valley “more of the same”. I was trying to find some redeeming qualities, but we kept having problems with stability. There were so many crashes and error messages, we did not even make it to the infamous two bowling alleys.

  3. It's the way that things get caught up that is surprising to me. Maybe my inexperience is showing… but it feels like they get 50-75% percent into the project and stop asking that key question – “does this suck?”Live at least has SOME features that people want – I like the capabilities of the online store, and the friend features are good. But Sony went ahead and did this without even getting the basics of online play down – which I think is inexcusable, given that Microsoft launched with it done right before the PS3 shipped!

  4. I have not played it yet myself but I think a lot of times these ideas get caught up in the marketing and money of it all and they loose sight of the original vision. Home just ended being a competitor software against live. Even though live does have this feature set… no one is really asking for it.

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