So, I attended my first virtual event, the Playstation Home Street Fighter IV Fight Night last Saturday. It was all right, but a few things made it a bit underwhelming. First, there wasn't really a dedicated space for the event. We met in the middle of the Home Mall, which is just an open area. There was no stage, no place to sit, no decorations, nothing in particular to mark the event. Just a Mall lobby. Second, there didn't appear to be many people there. I think that's because when you game launch, your avatar disappears from Home. So, since everyone is actually playing Street Fighter, there are no avatars in the Home Mall to make it look like a happening social function. Third, this is the first time I've tried really conversing with anyone in Home, and with the PS3 controller, and sometimes the TE fightstick, it is SLOW and PAINFUL to send even the briefest of messages. Fourth, the time it takes to launch the game, and then return to Home afterwards is seriously slow, and when you return to Home, you don't resume from the place you left off, you get sent back to the Mall entrance. Fifth, SFIV game launching allows you to launch the game with only one other person. You get placed in a lobby together and have player matches. It would be nice to be able to launch the game with multiple people and do round robins or tournaments or something. I'm used to playing ranked matches, where I play new people after each match. I wasn't used to playing the same person ten matches in a row, and I was getting a bit antsy to move on to the next challenger.

Now, I know it's easy to criticize and easy to make suggestions, while it is much harder to put those suggestions into practice, but here is what I envision to be an ideal Home-based Street Fighter IV Fight Night: 1) a dedicated space for the event made to look like an arcade; 2) instead of people's avatars disappearing when they launch a game, they could be facing an arcade cabinet (like the ones in the Home Bowling Alley); 3) I've got to get a keyboard or headset to talk to others; 4) find a way to reduce load times going in and out of Home to make the transition more seamless-is the PS3 powerful enough to have both programs running at once?; 5) multi-person (i.e. 8-player) game launching to allow round robins and tournaments; 6) find a way to broadcast matches on a screen in the Home space, or allow for spectators somehow, like in the Home Theatre.

I think the SFIV Fight Nights are a great idea in theory, but I find it a shame that I have more fun when I'm just playing ranked matches through SFIV, without Home game launching.