Home Sweet Home?

Sony released Home into the wild on Thursday as a public beta so I figured we'd give it a try since this little project ended up taking about 2 years to push out. After some issues with trying to sign-in, we were immediately hit with a create your dude screen which had your standard customization tools to tweak out your face, body, hair, and clothes. I noticed alot of the pre-set face options looked really weird, and Jason couldn't really find one that looked...well, asian, so he opted for your standard white-boy look. Anyway, they had about a handful of clothes to choose from, Jason picked out a stylish white tee with some blue jeans and we set off into Home.

After making our dude we spawned in a house, which I guess belonged to us, and it had a nice modern day look to it overlooking the ocean, nice. The apartment(?) was kinda empty with only a few couches and a coffee table in the living room. It got boring fast so we brought up the map and it showed several other locations we could visit which included a movie theatre, mall, park, and bowling alley. Jason chose the theatre and it brought up a download queue which took about 3 minutes.

We spawned inside a movie theatre room where a whole bunch of people were dancing, dancing, and doing more dancing. It was like a yahoo chat room, except in a virtual movie theatre, and what do you think a whole bunch of people from yahoo chat would do in a virtual movie theatre? That's right, dance in front of the movie screen yelling PORNO, PORNO, PROM, PRONO.

We picked out a seat in the front row and sat down next a brotha and waited a good 10-15 minutes for the movie to load. It finally came on and we watched a trailer for the movie "Twilight" and a Paramore music video, with a whole bunch of dudes dancing and chatting in front of the screen, with a bubble machine going on. And even though the trailer was set on an indefinite loop, there were still people asking when the movie would come on, yep.

We decided to check out the mall which took another 3 minutes to download and it looked like your average mall with 2 floors and a pond area, there were even groups of people hanging out. Oh yeah, billboards and advertisements were strategically placed to make sure you knew about the wireless keyboard and prince of persia. I walked into a clothes store and was suprised to find that you actually had to pay money for virtual clothes, that's right .50 cents for a hoodie.

On one hand, virtually watching a trailer in a movie theatre definitely felt kinda cool, but the whole thing just feels so weird and awkward. I don't see myself getting into all this but I think there's enough people who like the whole virtual second life scene that would support something like this. The only advantage I can see for something like this is to virtually watch E3 shows and meet famous people...virtually, oh yeah and also making a bad-ass gang and bully people at the arcade like Jeff Gerstmann did. What a weird and somewhat awesome future we have ahead of us.