I was going to boot up Home for a second time tonight to make sure I actually had a fair idea of what I was reviewing, but I can’t bring myself to unplug the DSL from the laptop and move it ten feet to the PS3 just to do so. So I guess I can plunge straight into one of the major problems; Playstation Home (open beta) seems like the answer to theoretical complaints that The Sims is too hard.

Okay, so last night I was actually going to go home and sleep at a decent hour when I noticed Home was on my media bar. Justifying the late stay at the shop seeing as I’ve had insomnia for all of ten seconds, I downloaded it and plunged in. The download was actually a lot smaller than I thought, given how good the screenshots looked. And it doesn’t disappoint. Home starts in your virtual home, a studio starter that’s a lot nicer than any room I’ve ever been in, seen on television, or dreamed enviously about. It’s not that my imagination sucks -you should hear what I’ve imagined happening to Brian Crecente, especially after the absinthe starts flowing like so much semen in a Japanese fetish video- but that the Home designers really outdid themselves. Architecture students could learn a thing or two from Home’s beautifully-designed and rendered spaces. I honestly can’t say enough nice things about it, which will seem ironic later.

The tutorial walks you through a few basic steps after the initial yuppie character creation, which involves a few dozen carefully-detailed facial remodeling tools and about three choices of clothing, all designed specifically to make you look like a latte-sipping trendster douchebag. This is obviously The Sims 0.8 and not Second Life, as so far you will not see anything weirder than a mohawk, which went from edgy to mullet-level silly thanks to the Howard the Duck movie. The point gets driven home when it instructs you to dance… you can cabbage patch, do the robot, or shut down the console in disgust and go do something meaningful with your life. Given my aversion to going outside or even putting on underwear, I went onward.

Home has been in a perpetual beta state since before I can even remember, which isn’t as far back as you’d expect given the potent cocktail of booze, insomnia, and rage that usually powers my frame. But it’s hard to really judge the thing fairly.

Wait, when has that ever been an obstruction. Let the shit-flinging stupidity commence.

Step outside your apartment into the art deco future of online product placement. It’s damn pretty. Even more well-constructed than your suddenly outmoded apartment. Don’t worry, it’ll be fucked up soon when everybody else loads up and goes from a ghostly shell to other living, breathing trendwhores. Until then you can run around unobstructed by word bubbles and blasts of people breathing too heavily into their mics, as they’re all an intangible parade of Hollow Man stunt doubles. Besides serving as a hub of transport to several locations, the area is also replete with a music video amphitheater where you can vote on what crappy sub-techno plays next, and an honest-to-Bob fun little minigame where you can compete with other players to maneuver a flying saucer around gathering points and more fuel while avoiding colliding with cannisters of Geoff Keighley’s explosive ego.

Don’t read what anybody ever says in Home. Like most MMOs, it’s just never important. Maybe if they ever add the ability for your virtual home’s matching Ikea furniture to catch on fire, but even then they’ll probably just be talking about their balls and wondering if that chick they’re dancing inside of is really a chick.

Hint: She’s not. There are two actual gamer girls in existence; One died in the 90s and the other only plays Kingdom Hearts Final Mix, trying to learn the Japanese as she goes. The rest are either humoring their boyfriends or playing DDR, which isn’t an actual game so much as society’s way of thinning the herd.

People are dancing on and inside of faux women everywhere. If you play as a girl, prepare to be gangbanged by a group of Abercrombie zombies wherever you go; the area in front of the rows of seats in the theater looked like a gay disco and somebody kept shouting into his headset because he couldn’t hear himself. Disabling all voice and text made the movie screen visible and I was able to play a limited game of “Kill, Marry, or Fuck” with the trailer and music video for Twilight that were the only things playing in there, but I still had to put up with the sight of a bunch of guys vying for the attention of one pseudo-chick down in front.

Might as well crawl over the biggest pile of alcohol-soaked tacks in Home’s repertoire next: The mall. About six storefronts with three actual stores, the other three being duplicates on another level, the mall really drives the product placement nature of Home… home. Bored with your studio apartment that real trendwhores would sell their wives into white slavery for? You can get a summer home for five dollars. Five real dollars, mind you. As in you authorize a credit card purchase and the money actually debits from your account and the razor goes across your wrist and a beautiful figure is beckoning you toward a world where you don’t feel inclined to pay real money to impress virtual douchebags.

Almost everything costs in Home. Your new summer home can be furnished with the same stale white furniture that went into the studio you had to abandon because the feds were asking too many uncomfortable questions about your missing wife, but if you’re following a similar path to George Jung except without the cocaine or pussy, you might as well go whole hog and spend fifty cents on that recliner that was actually dyed. And another two quarters on the potted cactus. And the rubber ducky. And…

Every furnishing or piece of clothing costs you. And it’s not even terribly interesting clothing. If you’re tired of looking like a dumb jock in a t-shirt, you can look like a dumb wannabe gangsta in a hoodie, if you have the forty-nine cents to spend on it and another of the same for matching pants. And herein lies my problem with this: If I have to pay to dress my girlfriend up as a slutty Catholic schoolgirl, I might as well do it in real life. At least then I can live out some kind of misogynist porn fantasy of trading a blowjob for a passing grade instead of merely taking the abstract fantasy to a vaguely interactive setting and trading the simulated sex for doing the cabbage page on her fully-clothed form while she stands perfectly still and asks why I look like a Backstreet Boy in the process of slumming it.

The most interesting and unfortunately AIDS-riddled portion of Home is the bowling alley. The glass is half-full in that the place actually looks like a pretty cool, real-life bowling alley. A handful of lanes, eight arcade machines, and six pool tables, all playable and all free. The problem is that it’s an actual, confined space; those six pool tables are always taken and you can’t open a separate, “virtual” pool table outside of the physical space provided within Home. There are no duplicate bowling alleys, either. What you see is what somebody else gets.

They’ve taken a virtual throwback space and kept the virtual waiting around for your turn. And they didn’t even add an option to take that fifty cents you spent on a pair of black jeans that make American Apparel’s selection look positively heterosexual and they didn’t let you place it on the side of the pool table in the universal, passive-aggressive gesture that says “It’s my turn next”. You can’t even get in on a locked-down waiting list. Sierra’s hopelessly inept TSN service was better-designed than that.

But hey, open beta. Maybe they’ll fix that. And maybe, when that day comes on the next leap year, I’ll play Home again.

I should mention the areas that companies can create to promote their games, but I won’t. I guess I can mention that I went to the bar based on Uncharted, but the arcade game there was so hopelessly mediocre that I can’t recommend it, and two mysterious doors that require combinations that people constantly spam in chat nearby are always in use, so I have no idea if they lead to another mini-game or a glory hole restroom.

You do win free items for good performance in the arcade games, two of which are fun. They involve a pared-down version of Echochrome, a slow-paced Breakout clone, and a genuinely fun stacking puzzle game, among others you can find scattered around.

Home once again breaks down when you have trouble accessing your inventory. Or maybe it was just me. I could open it and admire the icon for the bubble-blowing machine I had picked up along the way, but I couldn’t switch to other items and I couldn’t even place the damn thing in my apartment.

So where does that leave us? A marketing game that occasionally entertains you as it sets out to, then at other times fails to comprehend what’s so creepy about dressing up as Ronald McDonald and masturbating in your room while you’re trying to sleep. It’s an open beta… that’s currently available to everybody… so hopefully they’ll just go ahead and rip off The Sims even more.