The original, wide-open Central Plaza has been narrowed into a small hub, with a decorative lake in the middle hosting a nifty remote-control UFO game called Saucer Pop, which is brand new to Home from version 1.00 onwards. Europe still makes do with a handful of chess and checkers boards, which the American shopping mall features anyway.

The music machine that featured in the original US lobby has even been thrown in as a big-screen gadget called Listen@Home. Europe has to make do with a soundtrack of tweeting birds and the (admittedly catchy) rendition of He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands that accompanies SCEE’s latest PSP ad campaign; as pleasant and joyous as it is, it irritates very, very quickly and is no match for the variety of tunes that Listen@Home offers.

What’s more, the Far Cry 2 and Uncharted spaces I happily tested in the closed beta from my UK account aren’t available to me anymore. In the US, they’re opened up and ready to go. I was extremely hard-pressed to find some kind of localisation issue within either area when I took a wander through them, and the only possible reason I can think of as to why the European lobby hasn’t been blessed with these areas is that Sony plain just don’t like us.

I will concede that, in part, the European Home snatches a small victory when it comes to non-gaming content. The Home Theatre in Europe offers a wide-open lobby featuring an introduction to the smattering of Watchmen content to come from the film’s director. The 10 screens in the cinema offer content including the aforementioned movie’s trailer, content from Eurogamer and tech site Hexus, as well as trailers for Frost/Nixon and The Spirit. The US theatre settles for a repeat clip of Twilight and an accompanying music video in its one, bustling movie screen.

However, when it comes down to the approach that is taken for each theatre, the US lobby wins outright because it encourages the whole sense of community that Home is aiming for. When you go into the Home Theater’s single screen Stateside, there’s a bunch of people inside sitting in seats and talking while watching the video on screen. If you don’t want to talk you can turn off the text chat, but it means it’s all too easy to chat to your friends about whichever movie trailer you’re watching and that’s pretty cool. In Europe, you can’t even do anything while inside one of the complex’s ten screens; you’re simply zoomed up to the screen, stood at the back of an empty theater, while the video loads in silence and eventually plays. It’s incredibly lonely, and off-putting as a result.

The sense of community that the US lobby seems to have nailed even extends as far as the spate of server problems that Home has seen since its launch last Thursday. If you manage to connect to the US servers, you’re greeted with a message telling you that yes, Sony knows there’s a problem and they’re doing their best to sort it ASAP. The message even invites you to a welcome party to celebrate the open beta launch.

In Europe, you’re given the same soulless message of how Home will continuously change and evolve, and how the open beta is just the beginning, blahblahblah and so on. You’re not told that there are server issues, or that Sony is even thinking of doing anything about them. There’s just no connection with both other Home users at times and the people who are running the thing behind the scenes, and overall there’s no equality when you compare what’s on offer. The US Home has had a complete makeover since I last visited. Europe hasn’t changed a bit.

You wonder what’s really going on when you consider that Home has been developed by Studio Cambridge and Studio London, who are – as you may have guessed – based in England…which is in Europe. That they have sculpted all of these neat new things for America and not thrown them into the European Home agenda too baffles me. Of course, for some reason or another, they might well have been told sternly by Sony to not change a thing on the European front.

Maybe they’ll say it’s based on “market research”, or something like that. ‘Different userbases have different tastes’, I can imagine them saying. Let me tell you something: a lot of Europeans would love little R/C UFOs to play with, and some decent music for ambiance while chatting, and the ability to talk to their buddies while watching the latest Watchmen trailer. We’d love to be able to sit in Sully’s bar and have a natter while admiring the Uncharted concept art that lines the walls, or even have a little game of mancala in what used to be a train station in the middle of Africa.

The fact is, the European Home lobby and the American one are worlds apart. It’s almost as if, in the transition from closed to open beta, Sony has given the US lobby a makeover and made the whole thing close-knit and snug, where it feels good to chat with friends, dance to music, or watch a video. And then they’ve just left Europe alone.

In changing the designs for the two “different” userbases, Sony have created two different approaches to Home. One favours direct communication while indulging in lightweight, casual distractions, and the other alienates you from the people around you and leaves the whole experience feeling a little cold and empty. It doesn’t take much to figure out which continent gets which.

And don’t even get me started on Japan…

CONTINUE TO PAGE: 1 2