After a two year wait Home has finally been released. Even though HornyMelon.com has been in the closed beta for quite a while we held off giving any type of review or impression of Home until the final release. We felt that there simply wasn’t enough to the beta to warrant a long diatribe over Home’s faults and merits. Now that Home has been released to the masses and we have had a full weekend to mull it over, we are ready to report.

Before we get into Home I would like to take a minute to talk about top executive positions in a company. These guys have a lot riding on them, so when one of their pet projects or strategies fails they are not fired. They have gambled with a significant chunk of the companies resources, put their name behind the gamble, and it didn’t pay off. It is not that they are bad at their job it is simply a case of the company no longer wanting to have their resources at this persons disposal. They are allowed to resign and seek employment elsewhere, often as a CEO of a smaller company in the industry. A good example is Peter Moore. He rushed the 360 out of the door and the result of which was a billion lost in warranty costs alone. He now heads the sports division at EA. You know, the division that releases the same collection of games every year with only minor tweaks. Hardly a step up. The same can be said for Phil Harrison. Once the head of SCEI and then Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios, now heads Infrogames, again a big step back. But what was it that made Phil Harrison resign from Sony? We believe it was his pet project Home. The reason for this belief is the quality of Home after nearly two years “of it is coming” hype. The reason we think Home dropped with so few features is because Sony didn’t want to risk the PR nightmare of having one of it’s controlling executives pet projects being labeled “vaporware”. After all nobody want to be in the same category as Duke Nuke’em.

When I first started writing this article I was having troubles trying to sum up in a few sentences my over all thoughts about Home. Home certainly isn’t bad, it has interesting features, and has some use, but I couldn’t come up with a “gotcha” phrase. Then I remembered a long running internet joke. “We put a search bar in your search bar so you can search while you search”……or something to that effect.

On clicking the Home icon in your XMB you are subjected to a few hoops to jump through. You have to wait for Home to initialize, then you wait for Home to connect to the server, then you are waiting for the message of the day, then you have to wait for Home to load, then you wait for the area, you last left your character in, to load. Finally you are able to then find your friends to talk/jump into games. The load time for Home is on par with that of GTA IV meaning…excessively long. This seems to go against the very purpose of every game matching tool to date, which is to get you and your friends into games as rapidly as possible. Ignoring the time it takes you to find your friends in the virtual world, you are essentially loading a game to load a game. This wouldn’t be nearly as “?” inducing if Home loaded on PS3 start up and took much less time.

Once in the virtual world you are subject to a collection of environments. Right now they are limited to the Bowling Alley, Mall, Courtyard, Theater, Apartment, Two Far Cry areas, and the Uncharted Bar. The Sony areas have ample room but are by no means large, and the Far Cry and Uncharted areas of the game are quite small and overly crowded. All are devoid of interesting aesthetics, save Sony advertisements playing everywhere. Each one of these is separated by a load screen. Why the virtual world is not a continuous landscape is beyond understanding. This is a standard feature for even free MMORPGs today, like FLYFF. You don’t really so much explore the world of Home as you do fast travel through it.

The main feature touted for Home is your ability to chat with other inhabitants of the virtual world by either keyboard or headset. This however worked better on paper than it does in real life. Female avatars are regularly harassed by male avatars and you are often subject to a screen of word bubbles full of nonsense. The worst aspect of the chat features is allowing just anyone to hear a passerby on their headset. People seem to have an inability to adjust their mic volumes to match the level of volume they talk at. Resulting in most people sounding heavily distorted. You have your usual constant swearing and annoying antics, but people have taken this a step further…music. It is not uncommon to be walking past someone blasting music through their mic…with the caution concerning volume mentioned above. I attribute all this to there being no over all goal in home. You don’t have people grouping, trading/selling items like a standard MMO so they are bored and trying to entertain themselves.

Another widely touted feature of Home is the mini games. These are quite entertaining actually. If you can get into one. Throughout the closed beta I have never found an open arcade machine save Icebreaker and Echochrome. Same can be said for Bowling and Chess. While these games are entertaining you are sitting through a GTA IV load time to get to Home in order to play them. You could simply cut out the Home middle man and load these games from the XMB, were they available. The nice thing about these games is that you unlock items such as hats and shirts as you progress through them. Which brings us to the next feature.

One of the things hyped about home over and over by Phill Harrison was the things you could buy, through micro transactions, for your avatar and apartment. TVs, clothes, tables, chairs, etc would all be available for a small fee. Unfortunately Sony has decided to really skimp on what is free. A couple pair of shoes, 5 shirts, and 5 pair of jeans are all the free choice you are allowed. Everything else you have to buy. After picking up an outfit at the store you have paid the equivalent of the now infamous horsebarding, only less useful. The selection of clothing is quite limited. So even if you spend $5-$10 on your out fit chances are you will walk past someone wearing the same thing before you leave the store.

Another purchase of dubious use is the furniture. You can buy all manner of sofa, seat, and foot stools. There is only one problem. Your character has a single sitting animation that looks like he/she is perched on a bar stool. Making the purchase of a foot stool or a big lounging chair utterly pointless. As he will be sitting upright on the chair like the uncomfortable nerd at a house party. A couch will set you back a dollar, but this isn’t a couch with options, you cannot change the color. If you buy a blue couch and then later want to change it to red you need to go buy the red couch. The cost of decking out a whole room can easily reach double digit dollars as every table, chair, decoration, lamp, carpet, and foot stool is $1-$.50. If you want to put one of your pictures on the wall you must also buy a frame for it. This isn’t the only thing that costs money in home. If you want to start a club, it is $4.99 and may include a monthly fee in the future (Sony even warns of this during the purchase). Another $5 purchase is that of a bigger place than your starter apartment. Now Sony has mentioned that you will get money that you can spend from the number of trophies you have, so this may not be as big of an effort to fleece the gamer as it appears.

Home is often compared to Second Life for no other reason than it is a social MMO, but this couldn’t be farther from the truth. In second life you can create things sell or trade to others, or you can create things that can be used by other people or make environments that others can enjoy. There is an economy and a wide range of other peoples creativity to enjoy. In Home you are limited to chatting and spending money.

At the beginning of the article I stated that I think Phil resigned due to Home not panning out the way it was intended. When he was promoting Home, Second Life and “Micortransactions” were the hot buzz words, and the “future”. Well it turned out Second Life was over hyped by a largely uneducated mainstream press and gamers have turned their nose up on microtransactions in favor of expansion packs.

Many will say that “Home is still in BETA you fool. Wait till the future features hit” I have a couple things to say about this. First Sony has stated that the reason home is in “Open Beta” because they will constantly be adding features.” This is press release BS as they know how much flak they would receive if they called what Home is now a finished project. Others will state “Home is free. What are you bitching about?” Home is anything but free, you have to pay for everything that could possible make a dollar and some things that shouldn’t. Sure you don’t HAVE to buy anything but then you are giving up the entire purpose of Home. Most of Home’s free features are duplications of those found on the XMB attached to load screens and avatars. Who knows, in the future Home may be a continuous world full of user generated goodness, but as it stands right now…..They put a chat system in your chat system so you can chat while you chat.