Exposing PlayStation Home's back-end

March 12th, 2011, 22:50 Posted By: wraggster

Hello, there. Here's something you might not know about me: I love Home. But it's broken, and that makes me sad, like when the younger Home avatars laugh at my belly.

Two years on and it's still a beta. A lot has improved since I first installed it back in 2008, but it's still a laughable technical shambles.

The menus? They're unbearable. Even with a lightning fast internet connection, loading something as simple as a grid of trousers on the wardrobe screen is excruciatingly slow.

So much so that I've been wearing the same ones for six months. You spend more time watching the spinning 'loading' icon than actually doing anything.




This has been a problem since Home began. What's stopping them from fixing it? I don't get it.

Same goes for loading inventory items. You have to wait an age before your items appear - even if all you have is the default camera and bubble machine - and once they do, selecting one results in yet another lingering loading pause.

And what's up with the camera? Take a photo and you have to wait upwards of a minute before you can take another. Is it really that difficult to write an image to the HDD? No it isn't. LittleBigPlanet does it in an instant.

Another problem that's been hanging around Home like an horrific stench since day one is texture pop-in. I approach someone only to be faced with a hollow-eyed, featureless flesh-coloured lump, like some kind of nightmarish doll from a serial killer's lair.

I, er, imagine. Then, suddenly, their face 'pops' in. Why bother spending money on a nice outfit if all people are going to see is a white smudge when they meet you?

And don't forget about the ghosts. Sometimes an avatar won't load at all, and the Home Square will be full of bizarre shimmering outlines, like that time my doctor gave me the wrong dose of heart medicine.

This is a service offered on the XMB of every new PS3. It shouldn't be like this. What if someone buys a PS3 and the first thing they load is Home? It's like going on a first date and seeing your partner turning up in a string vest covered in peri peri sauce stains. Your opinion will be forever ruined, even if they're a nice person.

If me, the world's biggest Home fan, thinks this, you know something just ain't right.

Images purporting to be concept art for an upcoming PlayStation Home revamp have been taken from a Sony survey and surfaced online. Maybe this hints at the beginning of a new Home experience?

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