Right, I've never been driven to blog about something before, so this is my first attempt so please bear with me. Last night I got back from my mundane summer job and instead of firing up Shatter as has become ritual since its release I decided to go and repay Home a visit and see what wonders Sony had unleashed since my last visit. Now I somewhat misguidedly thought that there would be loads of things for me to do and some interesting conversations for me to take part in. 
 
How wrong I was.... 
 
My biggest issue was the lack of a seamless experience, it took nigh on 20 minutes of chugging for Spanish and French adverts to appear on the many screens in Home Plaza (which was annoying seeing as I'm in the UK but I'll let it slide), the entire time this was happening all  the people that were in the plaza were transparent and jumping about the place. I thought I would bear with it as it obviously was streaming all the changes that had been made since I last fired up the program. Once this was over and order had been bought to the plaza I went for more of an explore, and then the same cycle of chugging and transparent people begun again! At this point I was losing the will to go on.  
 
Fearing that there wouldn't actually be time to do anything in Home with all this downloading going on I queued up to download all the areas I was interested in and went off to brush my teeth and have some milk.  When I returned the Resident Evil 5, Red Bull arena, Events Podium, inFamous space and cinema had all downloaded and were ready to go, awesome! I thought... How wrong was I! every time I went into a new area everything would chug and transparent people would be running about (or dancing). Now at this point (or earlier in my post) you might have begun thinking well you obviously just have a bad/slow connection, I can tell you I don't, usually online games fly both on the PC and PS3, so all of this was very frustrating.  
 
Aside from all of these issues with loading up the various areas I wanted to visit I also found that once the loading was done there really wasn't much for me to do within the area's. Don't get me wrong they are for the most part pretty impressive, for example in the inFamous space the atmosphere was that of walking around a set that had been used in the game, giving you the feeling of being behind the scenes as it were. Everything was well designed and reflected the game world that it was created to represent very well. I looked around for something that I could use to justify why I had spent the last 20 minutes downloading but came up short. The only major thing going on was the trailer and the blog. The trailer was of lower res than the one you can download from the playstation store (which also involves significantly less hassle in obtaining) and the blog although interesting is something that would be much better delivered through a standard browser rather than a 3D experience. 
 
Having been somewhat impressed and also dismayed at the infamous space I moved on to the Cinema. I walked through he front door and again was really Impressed by the well designed area and the quality of the thought that had gone into the layout and general atmosphere, I really could have imagined I was at my local Odeon and was about to go watch a film. I especially like the way posters were used outside the doors to the screens to show which trailer was playing. However the poster was pretty low res and once I got into the cinema proper the same experience that I had watching the inFamous trailer was repeated. The trailer was a low res and just wasn’t very impressive. 
 
At this point I was pretty much about to fall asleep after eight hours building laptops for school kids and a couple of hours spent in Home, so I decided to call it a night and vowed to come back to Home in a few days to see how things were going. As you might have worked out from my mini review of sorts I'm not that impressed so far with Home. It has come a long way since launch last year but there is still a lot more work I feel that needs to be done in creating a fulfilling experience. I'm hopeful that at some point in the future it will become something that I fire once or twice a week and to have a look around a space for a game I’m thinking of buying (after going to the inFamous space I am more motivated to buy the game)  
 
I just won't be for now.  
 
(These are obviously my experiences of Home and yours might differ, also I was using the European Home so other regions might have a totally experience. I'd be interested in hearing about what the feeling of people from different regions are)

Home is and always will be a place for idiots to have cyber-sex and nothing more.

 I remember when the Home Beta Keys were first going out...I wanted to try it out so bad (before Giant Bomb on the PSU Forums/GS Forums).  Anyways, I finally get a key a couple months after the first wave...and I hated it.  God damn, I was in there for about 20 minutes...and then haven't been back since.   I know your pain.

It's just plain not ready. I like the fact that people get to go out there and mess around with what they have, but Sony doesn't seem to know how to advance Home yet. Adding all of these little spaces means very little if all you can do is pesky scavenger hunts. Who actually likes scavenger hunts, like ever? 
 
Seems like Sony is afraid of people hurting each other's avatars (like MS), which is a shame. Several of the spaces are Mature rated games, come on stop bullshitting customers. Guess that's the Japanese style of design beaming through as always.

Whoa people read my post, I didn't actually think anyone would read it. Cheers guys its the first time I've ever writen anything like it...  
 
I just get the feeling that its a victim of the designers ambition really, its a great concept sure but there just too much they want they want to achieve. I really do think instead of doing a whole virtual world thing they should do more of 360 style frontend. I played about with one of my mates 360's the other day,  I've always liked the 360 but the whole interface just made me like it more. It was slick and incorporated some of the ideas that form the basis of the thinking behind Home I feel...

I visit Home every few months to see what's changed.  My last visit was much like your own, but it is a marked improvement over what Home was like when it was first made widely available.  However, even with all the advancements, there is still really not much to do there but virtu-dance and eavesdrop on text conversations between junior high kids.  I haven't been there is a while but I still don't understand why people need to wait in line to play any of the offered games.  And if the world isn't instanced then why are there so few people there in comparison to something like a WoW server?  Back when I was playing WoW, you'd see more people just hanging out by the bank in Ironforge than in any of the worlds exhibited in Home.  If it is instanced, then why does everything take so long to load?  That is one of the overall problems with Playstation and Sony.  Everything needs to be downloaded and installed as one huge pack as opposed to patching what worked already.   Even so, I think the Home system could function if there was a reason (apart from marketing) for anyone to visit at all.  As a chat room, it's shoddy at best, and as a virtual world, it's sparse and limited.  If something as fucked up as Second Life can be more entertaining on a casual level, then you know you've done something wrong at some point. 

" Home is and always will be a place for idiots to have cyber-sex and nothing more. "