PlayStation Home

Opening onto Home Square are the Game Space, Home Theatre and Marketplace. Game Space is a curious little area, a bowling alley that also houses pool tables and a handful of arcade machine mini-games. You can bowl or shoot pool with friends, but neither is particularly compelling. During bowling, for instance, your avatars simply sit rigid on the bench and the only way you know the other player is taking their shot is because a bowling ball mysteriously flies down the lane by itself. Given the communal nature of Home, this whole area feels curiously slim. Surely, at the very least, the rudimentary arcade games could be replaced with some retro two-player fighting games?

The Home Theatre is where you'll head to watch trailers and other specific video footage. It's a multiplex cinema, with ten screens. During our visit, five were featuring trailers for flicks like Indiana Jones, Kung Fu Panda and the painfully awesome R-rated trailer for Pineapple Express, while the other five hosted E3 trailers for upcoming Sony releases. Unlike the outdoor screens, Home Theatre videos only load as you enter each auditorium. Inside each screen there's no way of moving around or chatting, you're simply presented with a static view of a cinema, and the option to zoom in closer. Even then, the trailers play very small in the middle of the screen and obviously suffer from compression artefacts. They're obviously still finding a balance between loading speed and quality - and these may even be placeholder trailers dropped in for the sake of the beta - but once again it feels like a strangely solitary way of viewing content in such a populated space.

Finally there's the Marketplace, or the Home shopping mall. At the moment there are stores selling (or rather "giving away") new clothes, new furniture and the aforementioned summer house. There are empty shop fronts, which suggests you'll be able to purchase more than just things for inside Home.

And what of the press event? It's here that my fluctuating broadband finally crapped out - thanks BT! - leaving me hanging while downloading the final file for the Events Space. Wandering around the eerily deserted space when the internet data flow finally creaked back into life, it's easy to see how Home has the potential to play host to some pretty cool events. With private rooms, each with their own video screen, and concept art decorating the walls it's easy to see how the old web-chat formula could be livened up no end. It's game developers now, but in few years we could see stars making virtual appearances to promote new movies or TV shows, or virtual conventions to run alongside things like the San Diego Comic Con.

While my aggravating internet problems proved frustrating, they also proved rather enlightening. Running a speed test, I discovered that for a long time I'd been wandering around Home at dial-up speeds. While this obviously had an impact on media elements like the video buffering, I'd still been able to wander around and converse with a large crowd of people, all moving about in real time and doing robot dances, without any lag or stuttering. Okay, so it's not exactly Call of Duty 4, but it's a good illustration of how accessible the service can be.

I'll admit, I was far from convinced about Home. I've never felt the compulsion to have a Second Life, I routinely ignore my withering Facebook and MySpace accounts and I'm quite happy to manage my online gaming friends as names on a list. But after exploring Home for the best part of a day, I'm starting to see the appeal. Sony needs to work out exactly what features like Home Theatre and Game Space are actually going to offer in the long term, and much will depend on how much customisation you get in the initial download, but I can definitely see how this service could become incredibly addictive to those with lots of online PS3 contacts. Hanging out in a personalised room, launching multiplayer games through the PSP and then coming back for some post-match banter? Home certainly won't be for everyone, but for those who value such features, it might just be indispensable.