Jack Buser has been the go-to guy for SCEA‘s PlayStation Home service. PSLS managed to sit down with him as well as developer Jeff Gullett and Crystal Braswell, Senior Corporate Communications Specialist for SCEA to discuss how Home is doing and what plans are in its near future.
The first portion of the sit-down involved a demo of the newly-released Midway space, which, if you haven’t checked out, is definitely worth a look. It has the feeling of a carnival but is far more affordable – $0.99 will net you a voucher for 50 tickets. Each game is only one ticket, so you get plenty of playtime out of your dollar. Each of these games have 10 levels of increasing difficulty, and there are in-Home rewards for progressing in each. All the while, of course, there are people all around socializing. Jack Buser stressed that PlayStation Home is now seen as one of the main pillars of the PlayStation experience in Sony’s eyes. With its latest successes (more on that in the Q & A), Home is going to continually change, and the Home that you see today is not what you will see in the future. This is evident even today – if you haven’t been in Home for a couple of months or even longer, it is worth a look now with all there is to see, do (over 100 games to play, and more activities) and earn.
After the Midway space demo, Jeff Gullett took the reins of a space still in development, a minigolf game. In the brief portion that was shown, it already appeared to be at least as in-depth, if not more so, than the full PSN release Planet MiniGolf. It had multiple goals per hole, SIXAXIS controls for some powerups, secret paths and holes, and more. It really felt like a complete PSN release, but yet it was still entirely within Home – Jeff’s avatar was playing the game while still being able to chat with anyone else playing. Jack Buser likened Home to an arcade from the ’80s/’90s, when you could get together with a group of friends to play games against or with each other, all without leaving the area.
With that impressive demo out of the way, the Q & A session could begin, which you can read on the next page.
