Home celebrates birthday with free stuff

By Ellie Gibson Published 10 December, 2009

Tree houses! Santa Claus! Flashing hats!

PlayStation Home is one year-old this month and to celebrate Sony is releasing a bunch of free virtual stuff.

According to the European PlayStation blog that'll include a free Ewok-style Tree House. There's also the MotorStorm: Pacific Rift camp personal space, which has a dock and a dance tent.

Today will see the opening of the Winter Wonderland space in the Shopping Centre. Your help is required to help Santa's elves finish decorating, and you can visit the man himself to receive some mini-games. Careful now.

Meanwhile, you can now pick up a flashing hat, choosing from red, blue, green or yellow, in the Alter Ego store. Plus there are two new masks.

And finally, Sony has found a fix to an error which caused problems for some people trying to log in to Home. There will be some extended downtime today while it's all sorted out.

Picture of Ellie.

About Ellie Gibson

Since joining Eurogamer in the mid 2000s, Ellie has written about subjects as diverse as the fall of Gizmondo, the rise of Hollyoaks actresses in Red Alert games and the noise a bear makes under NSFW circumstances.

Read more articles from Ellie by visiting the Ellie Gibson archive page.

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Comments (13) Latest comment 2 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • 52pickup #1 2 years ago

    Oh a tree house...

    In other news, Sony might have finally named their motion controller... GEM! it's on IGN.com

  • kipper #2 2 years ago

    A silly question perhaps, but is Home still an open beta, or is it officially 'released' now?

  • Boomerang #3 2 years ago

    A free virtual santa hat!?!?!

    Hold me back...

  • woodnotes #4 2 years ago

    GEM!?

  • mkreku #5 2 years ago

    Why GEM? Wait.. I should probably be silent, I hated the "Wii" name change too when it arrived. That came back to bite me in the bum, didn't it..

  • optimusprym8 #6 2 years ago

    Game.Emotion.Motion?

  • paulf #7 2 years ago

    constant beta kipper, it's very web 2.0 - the question is though, is it any good yet? I was chatting to a guy from sony and he said its making money so some people must like it

  • NorUraeus #8 2 years ago

    I have actually spent quite a bit of time in Home, especially the EA poker tables had me hooked for a while. I am still missing some true integration of home into the rest of the system though, like being able to use your Home avatars face picture as your PSN avatar for instance, or games having 3D trophies for home, or game launching being a standard feature, and some in-home game integration like ability to put scoreboards on your walls etc.

    Currently Home is being a nicer second life like experience, but for me that is more of a time to time novelty, while strong game integration could make it my main interface for playing misc games with my friends.

  • mr_goop #9 2 years ago

    Except the main hook of Second Life was that everything was user created, not purchased in micro-transactions from a branded lifestyle store...

  • callum9999 #10 2 years ago

    paulf - I'm sure my version of Home is now 1.xx whereas it was 0.xx when it was released as a beta. Doesn 't reaching v1 generally mean its out of beta?

  • oreillymj #11 2 years ago

    Home really is a bad joke.

    I thought I'd check out the Groove Armada gig last week. So I fired up Home for the first time in months to be greeted by a patch. Waited for the patch to download and Home logged in.

    Then I had to re-download Home square for the 15th time. Ok, taps fingers for 15mins while 35mb downloads at about 1k from Sony's pathetic servers.
    I then tried to teleport to the presentation space, to be told that it also needed to be re-downloaded. WTF!!! So I did about 40 laps of Home square waiting for another terminally slow download.

    Finally, got into the presentation space and found that the " gig" was some sad loners dancing on a virtual dancefloor in front of a blank screen with yet another download progress bar.

    Hold PS button and Quit.

    That's why I won't be back for another few months. The whole Home project should have been killed at a meeting 3 years ago.


  • jefranklin18 #12 2 years ago

    @FarticusMaximus

    The experiement can't really have said to have failed when it has such an active user base; Sony themselves seem happy with it http://ww w.gamasutra.com/newswire?story=... and they allegedly making money from it.

    Certainly, whenever I go online there are plenty of people in it and there are always many events occuring whether official stuff (such as the Groove Armada launch party) or club run events. Just like I would not join a model railway society or a five-a-side competion, doesn't mean to say I want them got rid of. To each his own.

    For those that want to do more than meet up with strangers online and blow their heads off, Home allows you to get to know them first THEN blow their heads off.

  • jefranklin18 #13 2 years ago

    @farticusmaximus

    Yeah, but my point is that it appeals to some people, and if Sony are able to make money out of it (which it appears they can), then it would be daft not to provide. Must admit though, I could not get into pain - got old really quickly without much progression.