So Playstation Home Open Beta launched today and here's a brief overview on what it brings:

The Central Plaza (main community hub of Home) has a pond where you can play a spaceship minigame which you collect stars and fuel while avoiding mines.  In this plaza there is also an area that plays music by some rather unknown artists (or at least to me), currently they are nine songs to listen to and if you can vote for the next song to be played in the song queue.  Throughout Home, here are a fair amount of screens on walls that basically advertise Playstation related content, which is to be expected.  You can travel to the Mall where you can buy various items that range form an awesome cowboy hat for $0.49 to a Summer Home for $5.00, and if you were part of the closed beta, you should have had the good sense to stock up on these things while they were free; other than that, there are chess tables on the top floor where you can play with others.  In the Bowling Alley you can play Bowl (duh), Pool or arcade games, which include, Echochrome (not the full game), Ice Breaker (basically brick breaker) and Carriage Return (a game where you line up three carriages of the same colour and send them on their way before the station is flooded with carriges).  In your Personal Space (basically your home), you can decorate your "Space" furniture you have; other furniture can be bought in the Mall or as prizes from playing the arcade games.  The Theatre is basically a room that loops a single video over and over, which right now is a trailer for Twilight and a related music video.

There are currently two videogame related spaces; an Uncharted Space and a Far Cry 2 Space.  The Uncharted Space basically looks like a club for hunter of various treasures with an arcade game where you traverse a maze of sorts to get o a treasure chest, all the while shooting dudes and snakes.  There is also a door on the second floor that requires you to enter a code in order to enter.  The Far Cry 2 Space has a board game  entitled Mancala which I have no idea how to play, but is played with bullet shells, which is awesome.  Other than this, there is an interactive map and dossiers with info on various characters.

There are also clubs that can be created (for a $5.00 fee) which gives you a clubhouse to decorate to your fancy.  You can recruit Home users and gather in you club and I dunno... have an awesome dance party?!

Speaking of dancing, you know who loves to do the robot?  Jeff Gerstmann.  So I ran into Jeff's avatar in the Bowling Alley while he was apparently playing some Ice Breaker, one thing led to the other, and pretty soon Jeff and a small band of Giant Bomb enthusiasts (myself included) began to dance.  While conversation was mostly based on amazing random nonsense, Jeff commanding various people to dance with us and discussions of dancing's deeper, philosophical meaning, "Dancing is obviously the answer, but what is the question?" - Jeff Gerstmann, we also talked a bit about Giant Bomb.  I asked if a couple reviews for games that apparently only I care about were in the works, and one of them seemed a possibility (Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm).  I also asked asked how the "Game of the Year stuff" was coming along and apparently nominees should be coming next week, so look out for those (this could have already been announced, I'm not too sure).

All in all, Home seems full of potential.  It seems like a hub for between gaming sessions where you can just socialize, play some minigames and maybe find some players for a game.  Once trophies are incorporated and stuff can be obtained through playing videogames, Home could be a very cool and casual place for player interaction.  Plus, dance parties that last about an hour with Jeff Gerstmann and Giant Bomb fans are pretty kick-ass.

So the new update came for Midnight Club Los Angeles that addresses the overwhelming difficulty in the game.  I played a good chunk last night and found it to be interesting.

So what they have basically done (or as it appears to me) is to make the Easy and Medium races less frustrating.  For these two specifically it seems easier to catch up to the AI if you wipe out and when you pass them.  If you dive flawlessly, you get get a good distance from them; however, if you do mess up and "wipe out" they can still fly past you because the game still has that rubber band AI thing where they catch back up to you.  For all difficulties they seem to have made it so that the opponents run into cars more which makes them more likely to "wipe out" themselves - this is where it gets kinda weird.  First thing, sometimes they just ram into cars and keep on going, and these "flying" cars sometime make you crash, and then makes it near impossible to catch back up on the Hard (Orange) and Hardest (Red) races.  Also, it seems that the only opponent prone to "wipe out" is the car closest to your position; so if you were in 4th, the only car that will "wipe out" is the one in 3rd.  This really doesn't make sense cus even if you pass that guy the guy in first is still driving flawlessly and it is always frustrating to catch up to that guy.
 
So all in all it is a smart update that makes the game more approachable; the Easy and Medium races are pretty easy now and can be beaten without much frustration.  You still miss those turns and screw up the whole race and whatnot, but that is Midnight Club.  It's a great game and now because of this update, the only frustrating races are the Hard and Hardest races, which, I guess is how it should be... but maybe not to that extent.

I went to the GTA IV midnight release at Best Buy.  It wasn't so bad, and I don't remembering being too bored.  I was just really amped for the game so every second seemed like a minute.  Only gripe I had is that there were these three guys in front of me smoking cigarette after cigarette, was pretty unpleasant; but I've come to realize from my many line adventures, if you don't like second hand smoke, don't stand in line for anything videogame related.  But is was worth it since I got GTA IV and a Dualshock 3!  And that faithful night began an 80 hour playthrough of GTA IV in two weeks... good times... good times.

Some Call of Duty 4 and maybe a little Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn