The Peakvox Moonlight House
by Phoenix, HSM team writer
In Home’s latest update, we received a flood of new content from O-Two Peakvox, including a new lounge and ninja game. The Ninja Lounge is set in a spacious Japanese palace, called the Moonlight House. The name conjures images of the setting for this lounge space; it is night, with a full moon over head. The perfect cover for a ninja, of course.
Players of this new free game are transformed into ninja students that must fight their way through many trials and battles through the large fortress-like abode. With this game, as with many, players can chose between single play or team play. There is a leaderboard and game rewards. Players can upgrade with purchases in this game, as in other freemium games.
Upon entering the lobby, players find a message board that shows the progress of a game being played or finished. There is a mini game at the counter of the lobby, where players can pick up a camera and take pictures. If you choose team play, the players are divided into randomly-sorted teams. The teams play until one team reaches ten kills; at that point, the match ends.
Some in-game pick-ups can be found on a player’s map: items like a bullet box, straw rice bag, and an item called chikuwa; this item builds up your “ninja” energy bar. There are also some special ninja skills that can be gained in-game — such as flying squirrel, wall run, or water run — when you store up your chikuwa. The chikuwa are associated with three elemental skills; players choose between the three for special skills, such as fire, lightning or water.
If you chose single play, your gameplay is based on a time-limited game where you must shoot and break targets before time runs out. With the sheer size of the Moonlight house, this is a bit of a task when you’re just learning the game layout. Upon finishing, however, you can gain some experience points according to the number of targets destroyed and chikuwa received.
The Moonlight House works well as a ninja fortress — somewhere to hide and strike at your enemy from the shadows. But as a personal space unto itself, it is hampered by its palatial structure. This space is so large and full of large rooms that it would be difficult to do anything with it. There are no games or gifting items with this space, either; not that that determines if I buy a space, but it’s still something to note. I have few estates that have games or gifting machines, though they seem to be the standard of the day now.
The moonlight House, for all its grandeur, feels like a great big warehouse. Given the 100-item limit, placing things here will be a waste of time. The size of the rooms will swallow the hundred items in no time. Items placed here must be large in order to decorate. Peakvox has a furniture item line, with several bundles available to suit the space, but even these don’t seem enough. And though there are several other Japanese-inspired furnishings in Home, you are still limited to one-hundred items.
Moonlight house seen from Ninja lobby
The question yet again arises: is it time for a core update to raise the item limit? Perhaps not all the estates in Home need it, but surely the larger estates in Home would realize greater sales numbers if there was a realistic chance of being able to decorate them properly. Look at the furniture count in the Mansion, for instance: yes, the furniture is baked in, but look how complete it makes the space look. Could you imagine the Mansion without that baked-in furniture?
Residents of Home asked for larger spaces and different layouts — and we have them now, thanks to the creative developers. But now we have the masses disgruntled once more, with the size and layout of the newer spaces being too big for the current memory restrictions of Home’s furniture channel. Now again, it is the restrictive item count in those spaces that is unacceptable. One hundred items is just not enough. Not if you decorate with more than basic furniture. Any sort of ornaments — towels, dishes, food, knickknacks, et cetera — eats up the furniture count ridiculously fast. And active items? Forget it.
Would 150 or 200 items be enough to adequately decorate a larger space like the Moonlight House, or the Dream Yacht, or even Dream Island for that matter? Given that these new spaces tend to have both inner and outer spaces that beg for decorating, something must be done to assuage the outcry for more item space; it’s simply good for business. Is this subject even worth looking at, with all the innovation and new freemium games coming to home? Will the developers lose buyers for these oversized spaces because of the item count? Remember that it’s a very small percentage of Home’s users which drive a huge percentage of the revenue; what incentive do they have to continue purchasing when the storage system is cumbersome and the memory allocated to the furniture channel is simply too low? The cost for a core update, in this case, is likely very justifiable.
Some developers have been very innovative with how they’ve circumvented the furniture restriction, by borrowing memory from another channel to give the illusion of greater flexibility (Granzella’s weathervanes, for instance). Others have reinvented the personal estate as more of a game experience instead of being solely a place to decorate. And these are smart moves. But then there are the ones like the Moonlight House, which don’t have any of those bells and whistles, and have to rely solely on their aesthetic appeal.
Frankly, the Moonlight House begs for something more than just a night setting in a closed garden with a city skyline above the walls. It needs something more to have been added to make it more of a marketable commodity as a personal space. It remains to be seen if this new space will do was well as the game based in the same space.
January 12th, 2013 by Phoenix | 2 comments
Phoenix writes poetry and is a photography enthusiast, along with writing for HomeStation Magazine. She is currently studying for a BFA in Creative Writing and BA with concentration in Photography. psn ID phoenixstorm21
youtube.com/user/phoenixstorm21
I agree with your assessment Phoenix. I went to see the personal space and was immediately turned off by the size of it. If you could play a multiplayer version of the game with your friends in it I think it would have sold many more people on it. I don’t think it was wise for them to give the full sized house as an estate. They could have made a different one with the same aesthetics, perhaps a larger garden in the center with just one area surrounding it to decorate instead. The garden in the space is the best part of it.
Nice article.
I’ve seen the space once and was impressed by it’s size (perhaps wrongly so) and the way it looks. I was caught by surprise at the view of the skyscrapers.
One couldn’t fit too many active items in there for sure but music and TVs aren’t necessary as there is music playing in the background. Decorating it could indeed be a problem due to it’s huge humongous size or should that be a challenge and bot a problem.
I remember paying the Peakvox (sp?) game sometime back when it snuck into view and while it looked great, I didn’t much enjoy it. Add to it that I didn’t do that well. Too many buttons.
If I buy it, it will depend on the price and what else comes up. It is a peaceful area that gives a decorating challenge.