Enormous Update Coming to PlayStation Home

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Greetings, Home-people. Locust_Star here dropping in to give you the straight truth on what new goodies to expect in PlayStation Home this week. Simply put, this is one of the biggest content updates in the history of Home – and we think you’re going to dig what we have in store for you.

Siren: Blood Curse Wallpaper 2

By popular demand, we have brought the Siren: Blood Curse space over from Japan (this space will appear in the European region at a later date). The basic overview is this: The Siren Home space is broken up into three basic zones. When you first enter the Siren space, you’re outside the Ward of Despair, in what looks like an old, rundown carnival space. The entrance to the Ward is just a few steps away. Upon entering it, you’ll find yourself in the mini-game’s lobby. Inside you’ll see video screens on the walls and places to sit and mingle with other players waiting their turn to enter the Ward of Despair mini game. When you’re ready to play, simply approach the receptionist and she’ll send you into the Ward (assuming that the background downloading is complete, which begins upon entry to the lobby scene and can take a few moments).

The Ward of Despair is the Saiga Hospital stage from this PSN downloadable game, recreated as a mini-game for Home, and playable with up to 5 players. Everyone is tasked with objectives that must be completed within the 5 minute time limit. If a Shibito, or zombie, catches you, it’s game over. Also, if you can’t complete the game before the time limit runs out, it’s game over for everyone. Successful completion of all objectives presents the player(s) with reward items in the form of some super creepy costumes.

Take time over the weekend to visit this space and earn these reward items, as we’ll be throwing a special event for those of you that manage to successfully complete the Ward of Despair mini-game. See, on Tuesday, May 12th, between the hours of 4:00pm and 7:00pm PT (6:00pm and 9:00am EST), we’ll be throwing the Siren: HorrorBowl bowling tournament. Users that show up for this bowling tournament outfitted with the Siren reward items will qualify for a random giveaway of the first Siren: Blood Curse bundle (episodes 1-4), which we’ll be passing out via PSN vouchers throughout the event.

In coordination with this space launch and event, the PlayStation Store will be offering a special sale on the full game and the episode bundles. The full game is now only $29.99, and each of the 3 episode bundles is only $10.99. So now’s the time to head over to the store and pick up the game if you haven’t already, or to snatch up those last remaining episodes to complete your collection. There’s even a demo available on the PS Store, so you can try it out before you buy it.

By now, you’re probably well aware of the Patapon 2 event/t-shirt launch also going on in Home on Thursday, May 7th. But I’m here to tell you that we have even more in terms of exclusive vids playing in-world for you this weekend. The fine folk behind the hilarious upcoming PSN multiplayer game Fat Princess have given us an exclusive “behind-the-scenes” developer diary video, delving into the inspiration behind this comic medieval battle royale, to air for one week in the Theater. This video will only be up for a limited time—one week only—before it makes its way to the PS Store later this month. So make sure you log in to Home and head over to the Theater to check it out before anyone else.

Moving away from this week’s events and into the realm of apartments, we are pleased to announce two new premium areas coming your way this Thursday. These two apartments are a new “Log Cabin”-themed area and the Living Room Stage Set.

The Living Room Stage Set will go on sale in the PlayStation Home Mall and will be loaded with interactive lights, cameras, backdrops and movie-related equipment to simulate a real-life studio production environment. The versatile lighting and camera systems allow for a wide range of desired angles, movements, transitions, cuts and lens set-ups that allow you to take control of the technical and artistic aspects. Combined with 12 props that come with the space to decorate the set, you’ll have access to the tools necessary to create your own film. Priced at $4.99, the Living Room Stage Set will be available at the Estates store in PlayStation Home Mall for your directorial debut.

On top of all this, we have a metric boatload of virtual items coming down the pike including Tekken costumes and figurines and 14 Killzone 2 shirts (plus a bunch of other gear in the Threads store). We also think you’ll pleased to find that the inFAMOUS pre-order and reward outfits will begin unlocking right on time.

There’s more stuff to do in Home than ever before, so come on in and give it all a spin. We’ll be looking for you.

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205 Comments

6 Author Replies

  • Here’s hoping the Disgaea 3 space gets here in time for the NA version of the game’s trophies.

  • Centurion-Legion

    That’s awesome. Ok so we can use the furniture that comes with the stage set on the harbour studio right? If so, cool.
    What about the Log Cabin personal space? will it come with furniture too?

    And where is the Killzone 2 space and game launch? I hope you release it soon.

  • to make home a better more fun place, you need to start to implement products that matter to more people and start offering better services.

    1) tournaments- poker, chess, bowling and similar games where winners win something worthwhile.

    2) similar to Nike town, have a Sony store where people can browse through Sony history as well as products ranging from games to merchandising and pay for them if they like something.

    3) gameshows- wheel of fortune, weekest link and other where more then one contestant can play at once.

    4) Snow for winter, leaves for autumn, flowers and sun for spring summer. Make home a real living world!

    5) allow the apartments to display an individuals collection of games.

    8) music to match the seasons

    9) an Olympic stadium with events

    10) team up with Dubai’s prince makthoum to advertise Falcon City in Dubailand ( city consisting of the 7 wonders of the world) and bring Falcon city to Home.

    11) have a car show room museum for the build up of gt5 with car stats etc car manufacturers can pay a small subscription fee to have their cars advertised

    12) dodgeball tournament

    There are dozen more concepts that would be bigger news!

  • @ Malik7866

    please feel free to post your ideas in the Playstation Home forums in the Suggestion thread where they will be read by the home devs

  • By popular demand, you should bring Siren: Blood Curse to blu-ray.

  • Holy. This is tight. Just when I thought the personal spaces were just gonna be apartments and houses, yah bring this new and creative space (I do still want my huge mansion, or the cool japanese house). Everyweek, something new in home. Keep up the good work yah, and keep the creativity flyin. But, when is the beta over?

  • Thanks for the post Locust_Star.

    I’ll have to say the past couple of months must have been really busy for you people.

    Home support is getting better and better.

    Keep up the great work !

  • When is Ghostbusters coming!?

  • Hey locust when will the voice chat return to home?

  • Thats amazing! I hope Sony releases a PSP game launching center. I don’t know if thats possible though.The least Sony could do is release free content for Home like clothes and some new shoe types!Still Sony is so much better than Nintendo and Microsoft.

  • Well… I these past four pages of comments add up to why Home is STILL considered a “Beta.”

  • SirDragonknight

    I personally am into oldworld settings. Rolling hillsides ,castles and villiages. An Overlord Home Space or appartment/ castle would be somthing I would like to see , along with some minion sculptures to place around the home.

  • Sounds pretty good, just hope you guys at sony dont lose site of the big important things you promised us(ie. 3d trophy room game launching picture frames tvs radios…) And on that note I noticed the TV and Radio in the video, will these be functional or just decorative?

  • this sounds like alot of fun i cant wait tommorow is thursday imma definitly check it out :D lol

  • Romper Room Magic Mirror?

    I see you!

  • we need the trophie integration in home, where is it? almost 6 months and nothing for trophies in home? waooo

  • The only Home stuff I want is that TV/radio feature for my friends and a Trophy room. I recently deleted it for HDD room, but I’m not going to even bother looking at this other stuff until I get at least the TV/radio option. I bought a house and I can’t put crap in it yet aside from Eastern world anime junk.

  • Sounds fun thurday huh? Lookin froward to it.

  • i hope we get tv`s

  • What about TVs and radios when will we see them?

  • I really want to play my own music in Home. This would make Home much more appealing.
    We can’t even play our own music when we play our games either. Please Sony, this needs sorting out we need full XMB access to our music no matter what we are doing on the PS3. This is a much needed feature.

  • jeff why do the yellow titles in the article appear in the above line of text?
    its making it realy hard to read the article.
    and you know what sony should do with E3, make it that theres a room you load and all of a sudden its like your at E3.
    you can see everything, walk around and see all the announcements.
    instead of having to watch it off different sites.

  • Will we ever get more options for male facial hair? Theres no way to make my guy look that much like me as it is, it’s very disappointing.

    And I’d definitely like to see a Killzone 2 area, as well as the resistance one they showed off a long time ago.

    And heck why not give us all the content the other regions have? More’s always better.

  • Please let the next ‘enormous update’ to Home not be content related, but be functionality related.

    We’re still missing so much of the ‘binding’ functionality that was presented before Home was launched.

    Game launching in SFIV does not suggest ‘universal game launching’ is going well. It should be a requirement for all games. It should be patched into previously released games. Sony itself seems disinterested in patching into even its own previous games. Warhawk? Wow!

    Home item rewards? Missing in action. (Again, please don’t highlight an isolated case of support..this should be in all games)

    Media sharing and streaming? Missing in action.

    Home website? Missing in action.

    The exciting aspects of Home was how it was meant to provide the infrastructure to tie together all the experiences we have on PS3, and share them within a group of friends. Look at how Home was presented at conferences prior to launch, and look at Home now. It’s like someone hijacked the project midway through and axed the most important parts of the vision.

    Can we ever expect that original vision to materialise?

    Content updates are great and all..but please bring the functionality.

  • Amen gofreak. Functionality is lacking right now. Content is not.

    It would be great if Home could get some sort of screen shot feature or a video recording feature. Otherwise the stage set space is kinda useless. PixelJunk Eden has video recording, why can’t home use it too? Maybe you could sell a camera item and a camcorder item in the mall or something.

    Besides that, there really needs to be some universal way that people can jump into any multiplayer game with a group of friends from within Home. Just like in the same way in-game-xmb now works with all games. There doesn’t need to be spectacular customization like with warhawk either. Just the simple option to launch the game and have your friends be there.

  • Yes I agree with all this. Home needs extra functionality before getting extra content. For me, I will be on Home a lot more if I could listen to my own music. I might even be tempted to buy extra stuff from Home. But as it stands, Home gets very boring after a very short time. If I could listen to my own music, at least it would be more fun to look around.
    Lol, regarding in game music and in-Home music, a small thing like the Apple IPod Touch can play music doing anything including playing games, yet the PS3 can’t! There is something seriously wrong somewhere!

  • I can’t be the only person that feels that Home has been one of the most poorly executed launches of all time – next to no content, pathetic ‘updates’ and a complete failure to deliver feature after feature.

    Instead of making “Massive updates”, perhaps try and make the core engine a bit less flat and lifeless. There’s a wealth of potential in Home, but none of it is tapped. It should have either have been shelved completely, or had a further year to develop not only Home itself, but to have some ACTUAL CONTENT in it to engage with. XI is absolutely atrocious. I bet Nokia are feeling a little saddened by the fact that Sony have entirely ripped off their less than successful Nokie Game from the 90’s. This, coupled with 3 or 4 empty, boring spaces that require ownership of either a game or extra hardware to get the most out of them just demonstrates how cynical the entire project is. It’s basically a micro-transaction trap for fools who are easily parted from their money.

    Or am I wrong?

  • And why do we have to pay for new content? I do not want to buy new content where there is absolutely no incentive to do so? Maybe give us trophy support in Home, that would be one way of encouraging us to part with our money in this tough economic climate.

  • Home is getting better :), the only downside are the big loading times.

  • The Home crew really should have a monthly chat in the events space, to keep us up to date on what’s coming down the pike.

  • Yes the loading times are a joke, although it may depend on your broadband connection probably. If it’s a slow connection, the downloads are likely to take longer than normal.

  • What doesn’t depend on your broadband connection is the fact that you’re taken to a splash page every time you boot into Home, and need to do at least one or two button presses to actually get into Home.

    That should zip you straight into Home. No splash, no button presses. If there are any important messages, pop them up as an overlay once you get into Home, like World of Warcraft for example.

    If Home ever were to become a neat universal touchpoint for your entertainment experiences on PS3 (lol?) then loading times would need to be drastically improved to reduce frustration. And they could start with the needless splash page.

    Oh, and work out a system that doesn’t require me to redownload spaces over and over again for minor changes.

  • i’m not saying that these aren’t nice things but i honestly must say i dont care and it’s also annoying that your adding more and more new spaces without updating older ones that still have things that need to be added like the resident evil 5 space. that’s the one that i really want finished i dont care about new spaces i dont have spare money to blow, and on a side note it’s dumb that you charge for costumes and furniture and everything else that you can possibly get away with. not everyone has a credit card and PSN cards are impossible to find so come on now guys be reasonable

  • FlyingBurrito76

    So … the stage set looks exceptionally cool … but if the person doing the video capture is one of the participants in the movie and not the “director/cameraman” … I would ASSUME that you’re going to wind up with a movie full of action command selections (the R2 menu) if you want your character to do things like point, dance, react, etc …. and doesn’t that sort of thing take away from the experience of Machinima?

    Did Loot create something to make those menus go away, or are we tasked with the responsiblility of trying to “edit-around” those things?

    Seems like a very cool idea for a space with some major flaws right out of the gate.

  • I love the features but what about the picture frames and applicances?!?!? ..and maybe flooring!

  • Poopookakabumbum

    How about Sony focuses on getting more exclusive games (ON DISC) on the PS3 instead of concentrating on a failed experiment like Home.

  • I just came to a realization….
    HOME will never be…or have the features that where shown a few years ago at E3.
    Why????……because the leader and driver behind HOME has left SONY over a year ago. ago…. That person was former president of Sony’s game development studios….Phil Harrison

    The only people keeping this thing alive are the middle management group (such as Locust), but there is only so much they can do without some major support and push from the Big Boys at Sony Computer Entertaiment…..which they will most likely never get.

  • Wow Sony is losing there ground lol.. Unfinished in HOME as usual thats Pathetic thats exactally why I stay out of KIddie HOME! Unioriginal Piece of Junk HOME Where si XMB for our Clubs we were invited 2 SONY! Where is some real Aracades Like NAMCO ARCADES YOU DUMB WITS!..So yeah thats why I hate HOMELESS SHELTER…END DESCUSION!

  • Awesome news about the Siren space. I was never able to get into the Japanese one since it was always full.

  • Ugh, I haven’t touched Home since the beta =/. Really the only two things that interested me were talking to friends, customizing the avatar and living space, and the minigames. I can talk to my friends on the XMB, the customization costs real $, and the minigames can only have a small amount of people at a time. No Home for me =(.

  • Home without Game-Launching is like a pb&j sandwich without the jelly, it’s not right. Get game-launching Sony, this is stupid and frankly an insult to this whole process. Thank you.

  • you guys gonna insta-ban ppl who place bubble machiens at the blood curse Ward of Despair???

    Its hard as hell to get in.. let alone.. idiots placing bubble machines there.. worst idea ever!!!! bubble machines

  • I’ve really enjoyed the Xi space so far. I tried to do the Siren game, but there’s so many people! Maybe tomorrow.

  • I want to say that it was pretty weak to just skip over the comments/questions about the TV and stereo included with the movie set space. I didn’t really expect them to work (and they DON’T) but the fact that those comments were ignored and later comments were replied to makes me feel like they were intentionally skipped so as not to discourage purchases based on those items. Either way, it’s worth the $5 just for the items, considering how much they’d cost individually in the store- and I like having a TV, stereo, and speakers to set up, even if they’re only “props”…

    I REALLY would’ve appreciated a straight answer, though. As it is, it feels like you dodged it on purpose.

  • Can we thin out the number of users in the “instances” for the Siren game? Everyone crowds the counter (must be 20-30 people in those rooms) and I tried to join a game for 20+ minutes with no luck, even though I was pressing X just as the games opened up. HUGE waste of time and INCREDIBLY frustrating… :(

  • this looks amazing. home was getting really really boring for awhile. i used to login daily and now its just weekly to see if any new updates came out.

    this should keep us going for awhile… Thanks sony!! great. idea.

  • has any one sceen the guy in home that pops up in central n runs a round screaming bout a nwe club called Dragons,Devils,Angels, i have also say that they are the true owners of XI. Its weird but they have sceen to be a force 2 reckon with. This is the first time I have ever sceen these events in home unfold to envoled people that r inside home What is sony up to?

  • how long untill the hospital minigame thingy?

  • It’s a great update!! I’ll be waiting for the tekken =]

  • I have a problem with Home ps3. that if i go on any downloaded places like the red bull air race when i press X on it it says that you cant download it because i have parent cotrols but i dont have parent controls! i have parent controls off! please help me PLAESE!

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