Home public beta available on Japanese PlayStation Store

Although its appearance had been rumoured for quite some time, those rumours have now been made official as Sony have just updated the Japanese arm of the PlayStation Store with a link to download the beta of the long awaited, and much delayed Home. You’ll need a Japanese PSN account to get access to the Japan store, but as we always tell you that it very easy to create if you have a spare ten minutes.

If you have not been keeping up to date Home is a community-based service allowing users to create an avatar unique to their PlayStation 3 console, and then move them about in a virtual apartment space, which is also unique to them. Users can then place items in several different locations in their apartment, change wallpaper, put up photos on walls from images stored on their hard drive, look at videos and play music to give it the look and feel they want. They can also talk to other users via text or voice chat, and start multiplayer games from groups created within the service. It’s kind of Second Life to be honest although not as pointless.

Seeing as this is the Japanese Beta we are not sure what we can do with the download just yet. And seeing as it is 401MB in size, and still downloading on my PS3 as I type this I still dont know either. However, once the download is completed Home is supposed to appear under the PSN tab on the XMB. Hopefully there wont be any regional restrictions to stop US and Europeans giving the service a look, hopefully there wont be too much Japanese to navigate, and if we do get access hopefully the limitations of the beta will not be too severe and give us a good idea of what to expect from the service.

I’ll blog my with initial impression’s of the service soon, hopefully everything will be as impressive as Sony have lead us to believe over recent months.