Feature: There's No Place Like Home: A Carnival Without Coconuts?

We've never been to a carnival

by Sammy Barker Sun 11th Jul 2010

Yes, Darla's Really Riding A Gigantic Dart. Someone Get Sid Waddell.

Not a real carnival like you see in the movies anyway. We've been to fairs, fetes and gatherings. But never a carnival.

PlayStation Home's new Midway Carnival space is the kind you never see in real-life — its set at night time in a vast opening. There's a gothic feel to the place, it's almost like stepping into the opening of a Goosebumps novel (remember those?). In fact - we were half anticipating a weird ventriloquist dummy to emerge from the shadows and sap our avatar of his soul. Yeah, we've never been to a carnival like that.

It's cool though, because it allows the Home engine to flex its muscle. We still continue to believe that, for an online virtual world, Home has some pretty stunning graphics. And that's apparent here. The space is busy — there are tons of events and attractions to look at, and they've all got a pretty bold and cohesive art-style to them. But it's the lighting that's most impressive here, as the glow of various stalls and stands add colour to the dark outdoors around you.

The PlayStation Home carnival works as thus: admission is free but you'll need tickets to interact with the space's mountain of mini-games. You can buy 50 tickets for £0.79. Each time you play a game, you'll use a ticket. If you really don't want to buy a fistful of tickets, occasionally entry to the games will be free. An announcement of this flashes onto the HUD, but the game only remains free for a minute or so. Plus, naturally people rush directly to the free game, so you're going to want to hope the carnival's empty if you're looking to be a cheap-skate. When we dropped by, it was rammed, and understandably so with the amount of content on offer.

Games are based on traditional carnival/fair activities. Spilt Milk has you throwing a ball at empty milk bottles; Dara's Darts is all about popping balloons; Flipping Frogs is pretty much what it says on the tin; and so on. There are about ten games in all, from target practice, to those strong man games that have you hitting a pedestal with a mallet to ring a bell. None of the games are particularly brilliant, but they're decent fun. Additionally, each game is broken down into ten difficulty stages, each of which is attached to a PlayStation Home reward.

Our favourite game on offer was the target practice activity, which has you shooting whimsical ducks and whales in reward for points. The gun lacks inertia, and the shooting feels fairly unresponsive — but, y'know, we had fun with it for 10 minutes or so. At roughly 2p a game, we recommend you give it a few tries.

What's most exciting about spaces like the Midway Carnival though, is the sense that Home's finally starting to find out what it's good at. Spaces like this and Sodium 1 excite us. They're almost like meta-games within a bigger world. And we like that. Personally, we'd still like to see Home tie more into the bigger PlayStation Network picture though. Why can't we decorate our PSN profile with a rubber duck because we shot one ten times in target practice? Why not offer a few trophies for taking part in the Carnival games?

It's exciting to see where PlayStation Home's going though. Developers are finally starting to hit on what's fun in these spaces.