Los Havros

Hola mis amigos, ¿qué tal?  Some say I’ve been to Spain, others say I’ve been away on a long and mysterious journey, looking for the ‘New Sound‘.  In reality, I’ve been doing the relatively mundane task of completing my finals, and thus managing to finish a law degree which I never want to do ever again.

This happily brings me to announcing my return to the world of gaming and blogging.  Truth be told, I feel a bit like Superman after his return from the ruins of Krypton: your woman’s left you for another man, and the world has moved on.  But here I am anyway, at it again.  It may take me a while to settle back into my groove, but I’m sure It’ll be worth it.  All’s that’s left for me to do now is cook up a pretty sweet blog post for your enjoyment.

Regards,

Los “there’s a snake in my boots” Havros

Tags: blogging, break, hiatus, return, schedule

To all my readers, visitors, and distinguished guests, Los Havros will be taking a break from blogging for the next few weeks, and will resume normal blogging service towards the end of May 2009.  I’ll update this notice when I’m back.  Promise.  (Update: I’ve returned!)

In the meantime, I’ll probably still be rambling on about exactly what I’m eating, how many brews I’ve managed to get through in a day, debating whether it’s worth going to the gym, and trying to articulate why for the love of God the neighbours are playing music so loud at 4am, all on Twitter.

Missing you already,

Los Havros
xoxo
(EDIT: does that mean hugs and kisses?!)

Tags: blogging, break, hiatus, schedule, twitter

Welcome to the final article in my series on PlayStation Home.  Over the past couple of weeks I’ve looked at different aspects of Home, but I’ve dodged answering what exactly Home is, and where it might be heading.

People have been complaining that PlayStation Home simply lacks things to do, content etc.  And we’re all told that to attract consumers, ‘content is king’.  So where is it?  Well, in the article ‘Sony: Home is the “perfect storm” for publishers‘ by gamesindustry.biz, Sony describe Home as a platform upon which third parties can engage directly with PlayStation gamers with their own content.
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Tags: content, EA, Electronic Arts, platform, PlayStation, PlayStation Home, Second Life, Sony, Video game, Xi

As the penultimate article in my series on PlayStation Home, we now delve into the mysteries of Xi which pushes the limits of what you’d think possible from a virtual world merely for socialising.

What gets me most about Xi, is the sheer genius of it all.  PlayStation Home as a cohesive online world has the potential to have lots of secrets, some of  which Xi is exploiting fully, creating it’s own mythology around Home which I find very compelling.  The first glimpse of Xi you’ll see will be through a secret Home area called the Hub.  It’s worth reading what Joystiq has to say both about Xi in general and about the Hub in its article, ‘Xi infiltrates Home- and it’s kind of neat‘.  My own thoughts echo Joystiq’s: why aren’t other Home spaces this cool?  Quickly followed by the demand: let’s have more of this!

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Tags: Alternate reality game, ARG, Joystiq, PlayStation, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Home, PLAYSTATION Network, PSN, Video Games, Virtual world, Xi

Following on from the previous article in this series, ‘It’s good to be back Home‘ I’m now going to address the availability of clothes, furniture, and even ‘personal spaces’ for a modest fee, known as a microtransaction.  I must admit, I felt a little sick when I saw the rows of virtual t-shirts, jeans and trainers, each priced at a few pence each.  I just could not understand why anyone would want to pay for stuff like this!

Being the intrepid reporter that I am, I felt I had to try using the system in order to comment on how it works.  I picked up a reasonably cheap yellow t-shirt from some kind of brand that I’m not going to give airtime to here, some jeans, and some trainers.  The whole experience left me feeling a bit hollow inside.  We’ve run out of clothes to buy in the real world, and now we’ve been reduced to paying good money to clothe an avatar?!  Seriously?

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Tags: Clothing, Home, Killzone 2, PlayStation Home, Resistance 2, Rorschach, shopping, Sony, Watchmen