by Kassadee Marie, HSM team writer

It seemed that setting up an account for a Home region other than your own used to be a huge no-no to Sony. But, a while back, for reasons of their own and without comment, they relaxed this no-region-hopping rule. (We could speculate as to why this happened, but we can’t know for sure.) This development is known because people mention region hopping all the time on the Sony Home forum and no comment is ever removed for this reason by the moderators. People even make European and Japanese threads on there; they and other people freely make remarks about their visits to “other Homes” on these threads.

So, last year, with the help of a friend, we set up a European account for me.

Here’s how my first few visits went.

Their news reader was a bit familiar, but theirs has a lot more (six) main divisions than ours. There are product promotions, space promotions (public and private), a “Challenges” section, and — at the time of this writing — a lot of comments about Home’s fifth anniversary in the general section, presently. The navigator is different there, too. It not only has more sections than we do currently, but they have different titles for the most part, such as “Highlights” and “Browse”. Even the ones we have in common are in a different order. The “Featured” section has a list of the top 20 most popular items, and a “Sale” section. These are two great ideas I’d love to see in North America.

Even for someone who plans to travel the world someday, the number of languages spoken there is daunting. I can identify German, French and Spanish, but some others I can not. Perhaps they are speaking in Portuguese, Finnish or a Slavic language. I know a few greetings in other languages like “Konichiwa” or “Bonjour” or “Hola”; I speak a little Spanish, which is useful in California; and I can count to ten (with a horrible accent) in four other languages besides English. But that’s about it, so far. I’ve always planned to study the most common language(s) before I visit any foreign country, but here on the European server I was thrown right into a huge melting pot of them. It can be disconcerting to say the least, when you are used to seeing 99% of the conversations in English.

Some places and things are the same there, but some are very different. It’s possible to visit many public spaces that are exactly the same as they are in North America, such as the Casino or Acorn Meadows Park, but there are also some of their spaces we don’t have, such as the four Audi spaces. Home Square was a bit reminiscent of Central Plaza, though even more full of advertisements and it had many portals to other spaces. Currently it’s snowing there and decorated for the holidays; the huge Christmas tree there may look familiar to you. They call their theater the “Cinema”. Their (two) malls look more like what we call strip malls than the under-one-roof mall we have here in SCEA Home. They have free items in the stores there, too, but not always the same ones that we have. There are a lot of rewards given out in Europe that we do not get in the North America; I’m assuming we get rewards that they do not, also. I love my bouncing Christmas presents companion from Home Square!

Guys are guys everywhere, by the way. A stop in Home Square, for instance, will net any female several personal messages and local greetings, of one kind or another. (This is true even if one is dressed in default and looks like a noob, which is a huge “guy underneath” warning in North America.) It was interesting when remarks were made to me in another language, because I usually had no idea what they are saying. I just responded that I only speak English and that usually ended it. Occasionally the person would switch to English, and I had a few conversations with people from places like Italy or the Netherlands that I really enjoyed. People seem very interested that I’m not just from the US, but California.

I don’t plan to visit Europe often, for several reasons, but if you haven’t been there I recommend at least one or two visits, so you can determine for yourself if it’s someplace you’d like to spend time. For myself, I’m busy with my real life and don’t have as much time any more for games, a multitude of online friends, and SCEA Home, let alone SCEE Home on top of that. For another thing, I’ve spent so much time in the SCEA Home now that it feels like the “real” Home to me. I feel like not just a visitor when I go to SCEE Home, but as Robert Heinlein said before I was born, while I’m there I’m a stranger in a strange land.

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