Welcome back peeps. As you seen in episode one, when it comes to online gaming, Kev is all about XBox Live while the Playstation Network is my digital playground of choice. Needless to say, I was delighted to open my inbox a few weeks back amd find an invite to the Playstation Home closed beta. The 'New XBox Experience' had been garnering a lot of attention and I was looking forward to seeing how Sony took them head on. The accepted wisdom was that XBox Live, even with the flaws it had, trampled all over the way Sony had decided to handle online gaming. Home would be the turning point, right. Right?

On my first spin through, I actually quite liked it. I was in a superb mood as it downloaded because I had managed to sneak into the closed beta - I was approaching it with a very positive frame of mind. Without any problem, I was able to quickly generate a pretty accurate avatar of myself and started moving throughout the glorious looking environments.

Of course, after a wee while 'playing' - thirty minutes or so - I started to get down to the root of what Home is all about. Fuck all. When you strip it all away, Home is a 3D chat room / game lobby. Load times are horrific from zone to zone, you have to wait forever for anything to load in the cinemas, there is limited room at the bowling alley / arcades / pool tables, the majority of people seem to be absolute fucking morons...

I could go on but I won't. Home is a waste of your time and Sony's time. It amazes me just how wrong they have got this. I honestly believe they could do with just scrapping Home and starting from scratch again. Streamline the experience, make it faster, make it somewhere people want to go in between multiplayer games. I just do not understand how this could have got so far in development without someone piping up and telling their fellow employees that this is absolute wank. Are there no actual gamers working in Home development? All too busy sucking Diesel and Red Bull cock trying to get them (and their cash) involved at the start?

Get it fucking sorted.

I hope Kev gives us a wee NXE rundown. Be interesting to hear how he is getting on from the other side of the fence. Until next time.

Dave