PlayStation Home: The good, the bad and the ugly

All isn't rosy in Sony's virtual world.

Sony finally made PlayStation Home available to the general gaming public late in 2008 to a fanfare of hype, but it's safe to say that it hasn't made quite the splash people expected it to. While it's still classified as a beta and so can't yet be judged as a final product (and it will evolve regularly over its lifespan), we're still free to point out what we like and don't like. So, following a plentiful vacation in Sony's free virtual world, we bring you VideoGamer.com's view on the service: The good, the bad and the ugly.

The Good

The first thing you notice about Home is how great it looks. For an MMO the quality of the graphics are quite surprising. The avatar models are detailed, the locations are colourful and well designed and, when things aren't too laggy, it all runs pretty well. It's a shame that there's not a whole lot to see at the moment, and to be honest the newly added Red Bull zone isn't very attractive, but we're hopeful future Home spaces will raise a few eyebrows. We've already seen that EA will support the service with its EA Sports Complex, so hopefully others will follow suit - and we might finally see some of the game themed areas Sony has teased us with over the past six months.

As a social tool Home does its job quite well. From our experience people are friendly and willing to chat about pretty much anything. If you rushed out to buy one of Sony's official wireless chat pads you'll finally get a chance to put it through its paces here, although there are still a large amount of people who seem to communicate solely with single words, emotes and dances - we're as up for a robot dance as the next virtual character, but running into the middle of a group and pulling a few shapes is only funny the first few times.

Perhaps the biggest thing Home has going for it right now is what lies ahead. There's no doubt that there's great potential here. If done well game launching while in a party will be great, the prospect of exclusive game demonstrations and developer interviews sounds brilliant, and we can see Home game tournaments working well too. The problem at the moment is that things seem to be taking a long time to progress, but it's a free service so perhaps we shouldn't have such high expectations.

Head to page 2 for the bad and the ugly of PlayStation Home.