PS Home Update : Games. Home Tycoon and Uproar

If you don't know what PS Home is, it's kind of Sony's Second Life platform where publishers can make "Spaces" mostly to promote their games. They are like chat rooms where you see other PS Home users and can chat and interact with them. In those spaces, you can do activities, play games, just hangout or even watch full TV shows and movies. It is loaded with micro transactions, mostly for clothes and apartment furniture to customize your character and personal spaces.

Every week, they add a truckload of new clothes for people to spend precious money customizing their avatars and every week they promote mostly their new sexy outfits and women swimsuit.

In addition to the usual swimsuits and all other additions to the PS Home mall, there are more and more games added. At first, they were mostly promotional. For example, Infamous had a "Target Practice" mini game where you could win Cole's outfit. Among other games were Dead Nation, Little Big Planet, Mod Nation Racer, Resistance. Even Red Bull had games.

But since a few months, we've seen more original games announced and launched like tank battle "Salt Shooter" (actually this one has been launched for years) and "Aurora" where the latest update lets you fly around in blimps for a tag game with friends. 

Today is the launch of one of them : Home Tycoon by Hellfire Games. When I played a lot of SimCity 2000 (in 1994), I hoped the game would eventually let us roam our city, chase robbers, and actually be a little like a virtual world created by you.

More than 15 years later, Home Tycoon lets you pretty much do that. You can build your city a bit like SimCity and after it offers you activities and mini games such as driving around or taking out fires.  It's free to play, but I haven't tried it yet to see if there are micro transaction to add activities or such a thing. Here is the small launch trailer that gives you an idea of what it looks like.

Another big content publisher in Home is Lockwood. They have a few spaces and they just announced their next Free to Play game called UPROAR.  A Team Based 3rd person shooter.  Don't expect top notch graphics as it uses the PS Home engine after all. Here is a small peak at what the game will look like.