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Sony unveils its new online strategy: realistic avatars, custom spaces and enough user input to choke a horse

Home is also Sony's answer to Microsoft's Xbox Live Achievement Points. Rather than just giving players a numerical score and an icon to show off to friends, Home offers up a black-lit cavernous "trophy room," in which players can collect and display 3D trophies won by meeting certain in-game conditions. Only a handful of trophies can be displayed at once, but you'll be able to examine your conquests at any time and swap them out of the display cases. Or you can wander over to the room's railing, which looks out on a massive, tiered chamber - think Galactic Senate from Star Wars - and displays trophies you haven't yet won, along with trophies from games you don't yet own.

Mikel Reparaz
Mikel Reparaz
After graduating from college in 2000 with a BA in journalism, I worked for five years as a copy editor, page designer and videogame-review columnist at a couple of mid-sized newspapers you've never heard of. My column eventually got me a freelancing gig with GMR magazine, which folded a few months later. I was hired on full-time by GamesRadar in late 2005, and have since been paid actual money to write silly articles about lovable blobs.