But first, ACII! Later this week, you’ll be able to dress your lifeless avatar in some equally lifeless Ezio costumes. I don’t know what it is about Home’s inhabitants, but they always just look so…limp. Maybe it’s the lighting, makes them all look a bit like balloons, or something out of a late-90s Pixar movie.

Moving onto next week, things get a little better, as Sony fill Home’s central plaza with turkeys. And you have to catch them. It’s like catching chickens in Zelda, then, only with multiplayer dry-humping thrown in as a bonus.

Since we’re expecting an announcement from Square Enix on the FFXIII front this Friday anyway — and expecting a North American release date — that’s not a surprise. What would be a surprise is if Home is the only place to see this video. That’s not Square Enix’s style.

After all, the announcement of Final Fantasy XIII’s presence in Home is wedged between details on Fullmetal Alchemist episode screenings and a sneak peek of Steven Seagal’s Lawman reality show, also taking up screen real estate in Sony’s virtual hang space.

But if you find yourself in one of Home’s 10-screen theatres this Friday, don’t be surprised if Lightning strikes.

This Week in PlayStation Home: Assassin’s Creed, Final Fantasy XIII, Fullmetal Alchemist and A&E’s Lawman [PlayStation.blog]

I stumbled across the PixelJunk space by accident this morning, while checking out PlayStation Home on my PS3 for the first time in many months. Later, I chatted with Cuthbert about the space and some of the early success Q has had with it.

The PixelJunk space was launched a couple of weeks ago in Japan and in the US just a few days ago. It’s set up as a museum for the company’s line of downloadable PS3 games; PixelJunk Racers, PixelJunk Monsters and PixelJunk Eden. This is the lobby, where I found people dancing and flirting, the two cliché actions of any Home community. See that video screen? It runs a trailer for the upcoming PixelJunk Shooter. Cuthbert said it runs off a Q-Games server and was getting accessed tens of thousands of times in the space’s first few days of release in Japan. That’s the closest he has to attendance figures so far.

Right at the entrance is a store where shirts are being sold for 49 US cents. PixelJunk Monsters headphones are sold for men; slippers for women. “In Japan only we have sold 1000s of virtual goods in just the first week,” Cuthbert told me.

Cuthbert said this is the most popular t-shirt in the space.

He said this one is popular is well. Given the constant flirting and sex talk I see whenever I’m in Home, I’d say Q-Games knows what it’s doing with these shirts.

Walking into each area of the space cues music from the related game. This is the PixelJunk Eden area.

This is the PixelJunk Monsters area.

This is more from the Monsters section, with Racer in the background. Cuthbert hopes that his team can iterate on the space and make it more active and interactive. For example, he’d like the fire tower here to occasionally shoot flame.

More Racers.

And the rest of the items on the store. Users in Japan and North America can access the PixelJunk Home space for free through their PS3s.

In an effort to promote the release of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, this year’s best mutant action-comedy, on Blu-ray and DVD, Twentieth Century Fox and Sony Computer Entertainment Europe are giving away free adamantium upgrades to Home users. And they’re giving away a free animated shirt. They call it a vest in Europe, which sounds much nicer than “wife-beater.”

How does one get these lovely prizes?

Well, all one needs to do is visit the old Threads Store in Home, presumably after visiting the Home Theatre to watch a preview of the Blu-ray release. Oh, did I type “theatre”? Yes, I did, because this is apparently limited to a European release. Sorry if that sends you into a beserker rage.

Here’s another pic of the Wolverine goods in action, illustrating just why Hugh Jackman spends so much time working out for this role.

Version 1.3 of Home, as previously detailed, will add universal game launching from within the service. No need to stop doing the Running Man just to start up a Resistance 2 fragfest, as any title can be launched from Home as of tomorrow.

Of course, there’s more to it than that, including new items, emotes and clothing categories. Plus, Home residents will be able to preview wearable items and furniture in real time. And soon you’ll be able to eat shrink cakes and take pictures with an in-Home camera! Truly, we have finally jacked into the Matrix.

PlayStation Home v1.3 Coming Thursday + New Central Plaza, Neptune Suite and More! [PlayStation.blog]

The good news? They’re free via Home’s Threads Store and also include outfits for Duke and The Baroness. Make it snappy, wannabe Joes, as these are available to Home residents for a limited time.

Of course, that’s not the only G.I. Joe advertising you’ll see, as the Home theatre will add “an exclusive video welcome from stars Sienna Miller and Rachel Nichols as well as a trailer introduction from director Stephen Sommers.” Sundry clips and mini-games will also satisfy your G.I. Joe cravings. Images of those costumes are after this.

A major update to Playstation 3’s Home is bringing a new 10-screen layout and lobby for the theatre, a Burn Zombie Burn space, new MotorStorm content and the Fat Princess Quest for Cake event.

The Movie Theater update brings with it ten screens, a new lobby and the ability to unlock rewards in some screening rooms. Playstation Community Manager CydoniaX also says that the coming months will also bring the “future possibility” of full-length TV shows or movies to the virtual space.

The Burn Zombie Burn space includes a crypt, videos from the game and a zombie-infested mini-game.

MotorStorm content will be hitting Home soon too, with the ability to launch a game of Motor Storm Pacific Rift from inside home and a new space that features piles of beat-up cars.

Finally, on Friday Home will launch a Fat Princess Quest for Cake event. There will be eight pieces of cake locked away in cages inside the Home space. To get to them you have to search the area for clues. Once you feed all eight pieces to the princess you get a reward.

The Curtain Rises on the 10-Screen Movie theatre in PlayStation Home, MotorStorm Game Launching Crashes In, and Fat Princess Needs Cake! [Playstation Blog]

Turns out that sometimes they do.

While efforts like Sony’s Folding@Home project, which uses the collective processing power of unplayed Playstation 3’s to research and better understand disease, have been around for years, it wasn’t until recently that console games have started playing around with this idea of collective gaming.

Earlier this month, Battlefield 1943 stormed onto the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. In the first-person shooter, gamers go online to fight it out in World War II’s Pacific. While the game’s premise of World War II battle offered little unique to the genre, there was a twist.

The game shipped with an area locked away from players’ reach. To get to this hidden map, gamers had to collectively kill one another 43 million times. Once the kill count was reached, the map and new game mode becomes available to everyone, for free.

It took just five days on the Xbox 360.

“We were tracking all global kills per a console,” said DICE’s Gordon Van Dyke, the game’s producer. “Every time a kill was made the server would report it.”

Van Dyke used an excel spread sheet and his knowledge of such games to track how long he thought it would take. He came up with three weeks, not five days.

Van Dyke thinks that the Playstation 3 version of the new map, which has to be unlocked separately, will likely hit early next week.

By all accounts the experiment, dubbed a community challenge, was a success. A success not just in terms of tracking the popularity of their game, but in helping to define and build a community among those gamers.

“I’m a big advocate of the community,” he said. “I think (ideas like this) could blur the definition of massively multiplayer online games in particular areas, and build up that community relationship In games like this.”

And the success of this communal achievement has Van Dyke, at least, thinking about including these sort of group efforts in future games.

“I will be working on (upcoming shooter) Bad Company 2, so it’s definitely something we would consider in that game,” he said. “But we are not going to shove it into something else because it was successful for 1943, we want to use it diligently.”

Battlefield isn’t the only, or the first console game to tap into communal efforts.

The Playstaton 3’s Noby Noby Boy, released earlier this year, tracked all players’ efforts in the game, reporting them to a database. The worldwide points were then used to unlock new areas in the game for everyone. It took players months to unlock just two of the game’s extra levels.

Eric Lempel, director of Playstation Network operations and strategic planning, says these sorts of community-driven efforts and rewards are the natural evolution of this generation of consoles. An evolution anchored in online play and masses of gamers.

Lempel points to the PS3’s virtual world of Home as an example of how community and building community has become an increasingly important part of console gaming.

“One of the biggest goals for us is bringing the community together,” he said. “Bringing another level of entertainment to the community.”

Home was recently host to a form of alternative reality game, something that wasn’t fully explained to gamers, but expected them to figure out the clues, the mystery, themselves. By the time the game wrapped up this month, 3.2 million people had visited it and it had 460,000 players.

While the creators of games will likely always be the driving force behind gaming, they’re quickly becoming not the only ones with an important impact on what they make.

Giving a gamer control of the environment in which they play, allowing them to unlock secrets, explore spaces, create new ideas, will inevitably change the nature of this form of entertainment. Perhaps eventually turning the concept of the artist and the audience on its head.

Well Played is a weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

To be released to help promote the upcoming Katamari Tribute (or Katamari Forever as it’s known here), Japanese users will soon be able to pick up a Katamari t-shirt and adorable little shoulder… parrot… conscience… guy. They’ll be available on July 23, with no word as yet on whether you’ll be able to pick them up in the US or European branches.

Also released today: this new trailer. With sock puppets, kittens and dung beetles.

Yes, as part of the series’ 30th anniversary celebrations, from July 11 a digital representation of the big guy will tower over the plaza of the Japanese version of Home. Sadly, like the actual statue (which is only up for another month or so), this is also a limited offer, as he’s only going to be there until July 23.

PlayStation Home内にも等身大ガンダムが出現！ ～ 部隊統率型アクション『機動戦士ガンダム戦記』プロモ [Inside]