Meh...

I wanted to start out with NXE, but screw that, I will start with HOME.
When HOME was announced 200 years ago I wasn’t really interested. Sure, I thought the concept was nice; especially that Sony would let everyone enjoy it for free. I figured it would be a more mature and a bit less content-packed version of Animal Crossing focused on network aspects. It’s not. It’s a barren playground for idiots with absolutely nothing better to do with their lives than to stand around among other idiots talking shit or playing a fucked up version of Arkanoid.
Let me write this in big, capital letters.

HOME IS THE MOST DISAPOINTING, BIGGEST WASTE OF TIME, EFFORT AND MONEY I HAVE SEEN THROUGHOUT THE 25 YEARS OF MY GODDAMN LIFE!

It would be best if Sony had killed the project when it was still early in development. HOME is a disgrace, a slap in the face for every Playstaion 3 owner, every gaming journalist and everyone over the age of 3. Everyone responsible for this obscenity should be hanged upside down and whipped.
Let me explain.
First of all HOME is ugly. I’m not saying it’s not pretty, I’m saying it’s hideous. It’s has the worse graphics I’ve seen during this and throughout most of the previous generation. The locations are painfully simplistic and poorly designed – they have no interesting features and no attractive elements. Even the small waterfall and stream flowing through the Square don’t help. Everything is boring and mundane. I have no idea where all the screenshots Sony presented came from, but they couldn’t have come from this application – it’s simply impossible.
The avatars players can create are even worse – terrible, low-polygon models with faces even Quasimodo would be ashamed of. When you enter the character customization screen you’ll spend a few long moments waiting for stuff to load until you realize that more things won’t load, because THERE FUCKING AREN’T ANY! The first glance on the face customization menu will leave you with a wrong assumption that you’ll be able to tailor the looks of your avatar to your needs (maybe even make one that looks like you). You won’t. No matter how hard you try, how long you’ll spend tweaking the setting you will always end up with something that look either like a horse or a toilet seat – with no options in between. It’s hard to believe but the avatars in NXE have more customization options than the ones in HOME. That says a lot about this “app”. But wait, there’s more.
The quality of the graphics is lower than bar charts showing the current condition of stock markets. The textures seem to have been taken form a 3D game developed in the mid 90s, the objects consist of a number of polygons that a one-handed lumberjack could count on the 3 fingers of his good hand and the shadow system it as advanced as a screwdriver.
And the worst thing is the aliasing. Oh my God, the aliasing! I’m sure that if you would stare at this game for over 15 seconds your eyes would bleed. Even the title screen has it and the title screen is composed of a “plastic” block on a grid background… I know, it’s some advanced shit, - I’m sure the PS3 heats up like a blast furnace when it has to count all those effects used for that scene. Looking at HOME is like a trip to a lumber mill. HOME is an ugly, ugly thing.
Did I mention that it takes ages for everything to load? No? Well, it does. I was playing draughts with some dude and his character model became its hi definition version after about 60 seconds. It’s ridiculous, considering there is really nothing in there to load.
Just to add to the picture I will say that the static ads in HOME are presented in a resolution so low that it’s sometimes hard to tell what they represent, and the videos that are played on multiple screens in HOME are of YouTube quality – and yet those take ages to load as well. And those are not streams; they are downloaded to your hard drive. Why?
Ok, enough about the technical aspect. Let’s take a closer look at the features, or rather the lack of features.
What can you do in HOME? Not much. You can redecorate your apartment… but not really since you have like 7 or 8 objects to use …all of them white and ugly. You have a few wallpapers to change how your walls look – 8 of them, all ugly. You can also go out to the balcony and watch the view. The view is ugly unfortunately – well, the view itself is not ugly, but the graphics designers who modeled the environments made sure it will look ugly. They did a very good job.
Ok, so you are done not redecorating your flat. What else can you do? You can go shopping – buy new clothes, new furniture, even a new flat. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Well, guess what. It’s all fucking paid, with real fucking money! So Sony said that HOME will be free, but in the starting package they give you squat and make you pay for almost everything else. Free content my ass. I had a choice – buy a summer house or a PSOne game from the PS Store – the cost the same. Crash Bandicoot is one of my favorite platformers, I can tell you that.

I have one thing to say. Fuck you Sony! You’re not getting any of my money through HOME.

So screw shopping. What else can I do in this stupid app? I can play some games – bowling, pool, some arcade games, chess and the afore mentioned draughts. All suck. Bowling is so basic is not even worth mentioning. The blowing mini-game in GTA4 is much better. Pool… same as bowling – GTA has a much better one, so don’t bother. Arcade games – all suck. I can’t be bothered to write about them save for one. A game called Ice Breaker which basically is an Arkanoid clone. When I first saw it I was like – “NICE, finally something for me, I love Arkanoid”. Four minutes later when the game finally downloaded (yes, you’ve read it right – you have to download everything) I was ready to eat my SixAxis. They actually managed to fuck up the controls in this game. Can you imagine that? Sony managed to break controls in Arkanoid – a game with a technical sophistication of PONG. What a bunch of cretins.
And chess and draughts? Well, they are what you expect – chess and draughts. Just ugly.
And people are sore losers – I’ve played draughts 5 times, 4 of which I would win if the people I played with wouldn’t leave just before the last move. I would like to send my regards to the nice Spanish dude who beat me in draughts and it was one of two normal encounters with other gamers in HOME.
So there you have it – playing games in HOME is not fun either so the only thing left to do is to socialize. But that’s no fun either – most people do not have a USB keyboard and even fewer have a headset. Writing anything with a gamepad is a bitch and takes ages and people with headsets sound like they are talking from behind a glass wall while chewing on a raw fish. So it’s not good. Oh, and the interface is unintuitive and ugl… well the interface looks ok, just doesn’t work well.
Oh, one more thing about HOME that is just so incredibly stupid - when someone plays an arcade game, uses a keypad etc. nobody else can use it, so when the person using a given device decides to eat a five course dinner, or take a really big dump everyone else is screwed – another great design choice Sony.

To sum up.

HOME is a piece of crap! The end.

HOME does have one good side though – the connection to the servers is so unstable that with a bit of luck you won’t be able to log in at all… or you’ll be disconnected a few minutes after you log in. As EXramp put it – “Thanks to Sony you’ll know how it feels to be kicked out from your own HOME”.



Now for the New Xbox Experience.
Let me start by saying that for me NXE is not as criminally offensive as HOME, but I do not have many positive thoughts about it.
First of all it pisses me off that M$ forces something on me that I don’t really want. Like Vista on Notebooks – you want to get one with XP, but you just can’t. Come to think of it NXE is exactly like Vista – it looks really good, has some cool effects and options that the original Dashboard didn’t have, but most of them are useless or unavailable and the whole thing is as user friendly as a hollow spoon. I don’t care how much practice you have – using it will always be a frustrating experience.
Honestly I can’t really figure out who the people from Micro$oft had in mind when they designed the thing. The 360 is supposed to be a platform for hardcore, male players, but they create cartoonish Mii-like avatars (which you HAVE to create and use) which seem rather opposite to “hardcore, male”. They want to attract casual players, kids, elderly women and lepers? Great, but they don’t have games for them. So then why? Why create something that has no defined function and is as intuitive to use as a hydron accelerator?
To be completely frank with you I can’t really experience everything NXE has to offer because according to M$ I don’t live in a civilized world and am not worthy – hence, many of the “cooler” NXE features are not available to me. That must be because M$ still thinks the Earth is flat and that civilization only exists on the piece of land from Washington to Florida.
NXE does have a few good features that I must (for the peace of my own mind) enumerate. First and foremost the ability to “install” games on the HD – every 360 owner probably loves that feature for a number of reasons the most important being the reduced noise that the 360 makes. And believe me it’s a significant change. Xbox is still a rather loud machine but now you don’t have to worry about permanent hearing impairment. Also, most games tend to load a bit faster. Of course not everything that shines is gold. There are reported issues with some titles – sound skipping, problems with cut-scenes, etc. A small price to pay if you ask me.
Unfortunately people with the 20GB model can only install one or two games and if they want to install more they will need to buy the in-fucking-credibly expensive 120GB hard dive – courtesy of Microsoft.
Come to think of it the game installation seems to be the only positive feature. How odd.
Now the negatives. First of all the NXE is much slower to use that the Dashboard blades. Also, a lot more has to load which makes it even slower. I don’t care how it looks – it’s an equivalent of an operating system of the console and it should primarily be fast and intuitive and it fails to achieve both qualities. Also, for some reason the swollen brains behind the creation of this deformed mutant decided it will be fun to add 500 additional pages to every section and make the users scroll though at least half of them to reach any executable function. Do I have to say it makes it even slower? Well, do I?
Another decision that doesn’t seem to be compatible with my cognitive processes is the necessity for absolutely every component to load before I can download anything from the Marketplace. It looks like this – you want to download a trial of a XBLA game, so you scroll through 237 “boxes to reach” it, you press the “A” button and the you think you will actually and finally be able to use the “DOWNLOAD” link, but you can’t, because it’s grayed out until every little picture and piece of text loads from the Marketplace. It’s extremely annoying. You can also take three guesses how that affects the speed of using the NXE. I will give you a small hint – it doesn’t make it any faster.
Oh, by the way – if you happen to have a long friends list be prepared to spend a lot of time scrolling through all the avatars that just had to have some stupid background elements behind them and are 20 meters apart from each other.

NXE seems to feature some better community tools, like parties to make chatting and exchanging pictures more… I don’t really know how it affects the community activities because every time I get to the part where I want to set up a party my thumb goes numb from all the scrolling so I turn off the console and go to sleep.
I must however admit that using the NXE is a pleasure for your eyes. It features many subtle animations and effects that really make it attractive. But again, it’s not the point.
Also, the new in-game menu that you get after pressing the “guide” button works very well (this is what happened to the old Dashboard – it was redesigned a bit and turned into the new “guide” menu). It’s clear, fast (surprisingly) and has more options than before.

In the end however I really find the NXE a pointless creation. Apart from the game installs it didn’t introduce anything useful and only made using the 360 a bit more annoying. Sure, it looks great, but I would rather have a faster interface than better looks.


Two words of comparison of the “community functions” of HOME and NXE.
Both introduced some new features for the users of PS3 and 360, but in this regard I must give Sony a plus, because HOME actually lets you interact with other players (both your friends and random people) – provided you are not constantly disconnected. NXE simply expanded your options to interact with people from your friend list and it did it in a relatively simple way.

Still, I find both HOME and NXE more than underwhelming and I like HOME more only because I don’t have to use it.