PS3 Home

[Jonathan Meer]

It's out; it's fun. Suitecake is the name.

[Super Buu]

Just be cautious is all I'm sayin.

[Waffuru]

I'm Waffuru.

[Jonathan Meer]

I made a chick character to see just how many sex-starved people I will attract. While a guy, no one randomly came to talk to me for two hours. While a chick in the Uncharted zone, four people said hi and danced with me within thirty seconds

Me: hi hi (starts dancing)
Fat black guy: (dances)
Fat black guy: once you go black, you don't go back baby
Me: blac?
Me: You kidnap people?
Fat black guy: no but i wouldnt mind being snowd in witcha
Me: i like the feel of snow on my face
Fat black guy: me2
Me: u tall?
Fat black guy: big all ova mami
Me: i dont like tall peeps
Me: i like short people
Me: like gary coleman
Fat black guy: lol
Fat black guy: you a midget chaser
Me: oh ya
Me: or amputees
Me: you wouldnt happen to be missing an arm, wouldja?
Me: thats my dream
McMico (random guy): Hello (at this point, three guys are dancing around me)
Fat black guy: It's between these
Me: Huh?
McMico (gets between black guy and me): Move afro puff
Me: mcmico, you look like arough person
McMico: git off da beer belly boy
fat black guy: these nuts
Me: grapenuts?
purple_grape: how u doing? (four guys at this point)
Me: you are all heroes
fat black guy: mami lemme hit dat
Me: hit me?
fat black guy: nah......hit dat flat **** you call an azz

Reported him. It's amazing

[Super Buu]

You'd probably enjoy reading this.

[Jonathan Meer]

My college filtered it =/

[Super Buu]

A few choice excerpts:

[Jesper]

Besides the aforementioned sex-starved people (which you can find anywhere), I'm liking Home. It's lame that you have to spend real-life money to buy things in-game, but oh well. I'm satisfied with everything I got for free.

[Waffuru]

It's lame that you have to spend real-life money to buy things in-game, but oh well.

Yeah, but that's how the pay for their servers. Microcurrency is huge in gaming now.

[Belle Hibiki]

Although I don't take them at their word expressly, my opinions on games do tend to line up with Tycho and Gabe. I don't own a PS3, but even if I did, Tycho's post about it would make me leery of nearing Home:

The Beta for Playstation home is now available to everyone, and now you know what I know: this is what happens when your marketing department tries to make a game. Here is everything you need to understand about Home, if you should accidentally launch it from your XMB: press and hold the Playstation button in the center of your Dual-Shock or Sixaxis controller. From the menu that appears, select Quit.

There are things about Home that are simply beyond my understanding. Chief among these bizarre maneuvers is the idea that, when manufacturing their flimsy dystopia, they actually ported the pernicious notion of scarcity from our world into their digital one. This is like having the ability to shape being from non-being at the subatomic level, and the first thing you decide to make is AIDS.

If you approach an arcade machine and there is a person standing in front of it, you will not be able to play it. Likewise, if you see people bowling and think that bowling is something you might like to do, you probably wont be able to. Unable to play arcade games like Ice Breakers and Carriage Return the first several times we logged on, these games had begun to take on an epic stature in our minds. These were gushing fonts of liquid fun, habit-forming and dangerous - for the good of our virtual society, the supply had to be controlled. When we were finally able to play them, we learned that they were the equivalent of browser games.

There is nothing about the experience of using Home to suggest that you are actually moving through a single, contiguous environment. It is very clearly a handful of walled off zones, where you are confronted by incessant load screens in a desperate search for stimulation. From the moment you enter one of their ultrahygenic "amusement regions," it's clear that all life has been burned away. You get the sense that this is a place in which no interesting thing could ever happen.

There is already a growing school of Home apologetics, fostered by the same Order of Perpetual Masochism that lauded the rumble-free Sixaxis at launch and suggested, hilariously, that Lair and Heavenly Sword were videogames. They're under the impression that because something is free, this places it on some golden dais beyond censure. It's no virtue to give away something that no-one in their right mind would buy. Sony has no idea what this world is for, and that ambiguity infuses every simulated millimeter of it.

This is the terrible secret that roils beneath their false universe: it is nothing more than a cumbersome menu, a rampart over which you must hoist yourself to accomplish the most basic tasks.

(CW)TB out.

[Kaden]

This is one of the reasons I hate Penny Arcade. Crap like this. Now, instead of actually forming an opinion of their own, people will simply do the same thing Belle did, and stay away from trying it.

[Belle Hibiki]

So, if I understand you correctly, any kind of review advising people to stay away from something is a 'bad' thing, because people aren't forming opinions of their own?

So, I should go see everything that everyone says is a piece of shit - and probably waste my time - because of some strange notion that personal experience is the only thing that counts?

I don't have to play Home to realize that I don't like some of the concepts it's built around. To claim otherwise is ridiculous.

[Kaden]

So, if I understand you correctly, any kind of review advising people to stay away from something is a 'bad' thing, because people aren't forming opinions of their own?

But you don't understand correctly.

I could waste my time elaborating, but you'd just disagree, neither of us would change our minds, and we wouldn't get anywhere.

[Jonathan Meer]

Yeah, that (Tycho's) post sounded more like someone who was determined to hate Home for reasons that could easily be fixed later (this is, after all, a beta), than who actually walked into it with an open mind.

[Sage]

Would you prefer everyone gave every game/app glowing reviews all the time?

[Josh]

Reviews only give you part of a picture, a person who hates JRPG's is going to give a shitty review of a JRPG. Unless you try it for yourself you won't get the whole story, any review should be taken with a grain of salt even good ones.

That's why we have rentals.

[Sage]

Well, of course. I'm not saying you should slavishly obey whatever it is the reviewer commands. I've enjoyed a few games that have terrible ratings across the board. But some people get so up in arms when a game gets a bad review. O.o

[Jonathan Meer]

It can be pretty obvious when, no matter what, some reviewers will simply never be pleased.

None of the disadvantages listed by Tycho are really as bad as he says. Exaggeration does not equal truth.

[Kaden]

Would you prefer everyone gave every game/app glowing reviews all the time?

Ranting != reviewing

[Jonathan Meer]

I don't read/watch Penny Arcade, but I'm going to make a leap and guess they're Nintendoids.