Go Heavy Water on a Budget
by Kassadee Marie, HSM team writer
Heavy Water is headquartered in sunny San Diego, California, and they’ve been in business for over fourteen years. In addition to their own content, Heavy Water’s work has appeared on Home under other labels. Does the Toyota Prius Solar Scramble sound familiar? Or the Scion Event? How about these personal estates: Monkey Island Ghost Ship, Bioshock2 Rapture Metro Apartment, the Post Apocalyptic Apartment, the Dragon’s Den or the Chamber Apartment?
Yes, these were all Heavy Water projects.
They only recently went into the estates game on Home under their own label, but they did so with a huge bang. You may not think of a $9.99 estate as a budget item, but if so, you haven’t seen Avalon Keep.
This enormous estate provides so much for the money. There are thirteen pieces of furniture included with the purchase, which are five chairs, a footstool, two tables, a wardrobe, a daybed, a large vase, a love seat, and a bed. There is also a gift machine that offers even more furniture items for the owner and guests, at one item each visit, and there is also a game in the form of search quests that provide rewards for owners and guests. There are interactive NPC’s, diurnal controls, flying fairies, and charming background music.
This is a very colorful estate also with matching rugs, runners, banners, windows and guard uniforms and those colors can also be changed by the owner. They can choose between red with a gold lion dexter; green with a dragon; deep turquoise and black with an eagle; and blue and white with a lion sinister. Dexter and sinister are Latin terms for right and left, by the way. Something unique to this space is a dragonfly’s eye-view of the whole estate. This point of view is the first of its kind and it’s a lot of fun to use. The owner and guests can use it at the same time and you can see each other’s different colored dragonflies while doing so. A store is planned there for the future and there will be other updates, additions, extras, and new quests. And did I mention the whole estate floats?
While a furniture pack is included with the estate, others can be purchased in your “house affiliation” colors and style, if you choose. These bundles are offered for $6.99 each and have fourteen items, including the house shield. That’s only about $.50 a piece, of course. Choose between House Dumont, House Raleigh, House Thaon and House Grimoult. They also sell two other furniture packs, the $2.99 Peasant pack of ten items and $3.99 Fancy Furniture pack of seven items. Presently, these are the only actual furniture items offered by Heavy Water.
In the Heavy Water store, three active items can be found for your spaces that are perfect for the Halloween season – or to add a gothic atmosphere at any time – called the Halloween Heavy Pets bundle. For $4.99, you can pick up the Ghostling Pets, Flaming Skull Pets and Vampire Batling Pets. Or you can choose between them for $1.99 for any one of them. Put them down and activate them in any personal space and watch the mini ghosts float around or flaming skulls or vampire bats go zooming around. As a bonus, these items suit the spooky theme as decorations. The ghosts arise from a gravestone, the skulls from a flaming cauldron and bats fly from a small belfry. They previously took up 22 furniture slots, but Heavy Water recently re-did these items to take up only six furniture slots. This will be true for current owners as well as those who purchase these items going forward.
Speaking of companions, one of the largest selection of companions with the same theme is the Peeps collection from their Heavy Pets collection. With twenty companion Peeps available, you have a lot of choices in design and colors. My personal favorite is Sunshine Peep – Blue Skies. These items are adorable, and have recently been updated to a larger size with more animations and sound. They can be purchased for $2.99 or in bundles. These items are are also available as ornaments for $.99 and as controllable active items in your spaces for $2.99, too. These active items were recently modified, also, to allow for easier handling. You may have seen or own their E3 2011 reward, HomeBoyz Peep; please note that it has not been re-sized as of the time of writing this article.
Other than the White Knight armor, the Defender’s pack of hand items and the Heavy Strike bundle (which contains a helmet and hand-held walkie talkie), the only clothing items offered by Heavy Water include tattoos from their “Heavy Inked” collection and several free items. Males can pick up the bare canvas shorts and torso, and females are offered a bra-top torso as a canvas for their many, many tattoos. Heavy Water offers tattoos for both genders, in several colors and a wide variety of styles and locations on the body. Some of them even move! If you’re interested in tattoos for your avatar, be sure to check out the deals they offer with bundles. Females can also pick up the “Pin-up Girls” full body costumes for $1.99, in packs of three for $4.99 each, or a pack of all nine for $12.99. These ladies have pretty faces, but rather odd walks and poses, so be sure you see them before buying.
With a history of winning spaces on Home, both public and private, and great start like this with their own labeled items, I’m really looking forward to seeing what Heavy Water has in store for us all in the future. I think their products are well designed, well executed and priced very reasonably. Would it be too corny to say that heavy water isn’t radioactive, but Heavy Water is?
October 10th, 2012 by Kassadee Marie | 1 comment
Home is endlessly entertaining to this California girl. Kassadee has been in Home for about four years, and loves almost everything about it (with a few notable exceptions). She spends way too much money there, and perhaps too much time... Someday she will travel the world and write about the people she meets and the places she sees.
I bought and love the Avalon Keep. I think that it has its own thing going on, much different from the rest of Homes personal spaces. It has a very unique art style, less real and more fantasy oriented and some great functionality. I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.
Tattoos are not my thing at all, in real life or in Home, but that has more to do with personal preference than anything else. I think that Heavy Water has quite a few very nice ones though, and the new animated ones are a hoot.
Nice read as always Kass.