Recently in PS3 Category

I'm playing through Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (Wikipedia link) on the PS3. Like everyone else, I was feeling that it's a little too cutscene-heavy. Nonetheless, I am finally getting the hang of the controls, and as a result the sneaking-around-rather-than-guns-blazing mechanic has grown on me. I've been playing for about a week, and I'm about half way through. I was enjoying it, but it wasn't a revelation.

And then it happened.

The cinematic at the end of Act III is the most amazing piece of drama I've seen in a game. Forget the ludicrous, complex, and overwrought storyline; forget the gratuitous T&A shots; forget the unconvincingly dumb end-of-act bosses. That twenty minutes of cinema was quite astonishing. It would have been excellent without the surrounding game. The fact that I'd spent days working towards it made it all the more compelling when I got there.

Suddenly I get it. Like it or loathe it, Kojima-san has a vision. Gotta respect a man with a vision.

It was one of those very rare gaming moments, when I was truly taken away by the scale and ambition of it. Even the villain standing on the deck of his boat, laughing like all villains laugh, wasn't out of place. It was great entertainment.

It now shows the time on the XMB. 21 months since launch, but finally, there's a clock.

My DualShock3 controller arrived today (Wikipedia link). I gave up the wait for it to become 'officially' available in the UK, and ordered an import. I did so via that bastion of respectability, Amazon.co.uk, which I find amusing - grey imports from the whitest of the white retailer.

It's much better than the SixAxis. It has more weight, and it immediately improves the only game I've used it on so far, Metal Gear Solid 4. I never realised how much the rumble added, until a patent dispute - now resolved (ars technica link) - took it away.

It should have been there from the start. Now I have it, I have three SixAxis controllers that I no longer want to use! Oh well, other people can use them for multiplayer ;-) I may even try to flog them to Game, though they don't seem to be able to give them away at the moment...

Wow! A rational article about Grand Theft Auto IV, from someone in the media. I particularly enjoyed her closing comments, a warning:

Gamers beware. If there is one thing worse than the middle-aged gaming ignoramus, it will shortly be the middle-aged gaming know-it-all, who's discovered that, misogyny aside, they're really quite an art form.

Firstly, let me say this: GTA IV is a spectacular achievement. I'm not a game reviewer, and I've not got far enough into it, and I didn't play - didn't even like - the previous GTA games. It's all new to me, and I love it.

Unfortunately, it's become rather unstable on me all of a sudden. In the mission 'crime and punishment', it fails to even start the game half the time. When it does start, it crashes a few minutes into the game. (Annoyingly, I was about to 'try my luck' again with my in-game girlfriend Michelle, whom I've spend most of the game trying to charm - there's frustration for you.)

The load failures are extremely annoying. I have a day-one UK PS3, the one with a 60GB HDD, all the USB and memory card ports, and half-arsed PS2 emulation. It seems to wedge the machine well enough to require a reboot when I do 'quit game'.

The in-game failures are even worse. After getting over the excitement of getting into the game at all, I get about five minutes in, and then it stops. The radio station keeps playing, but keypresses don't work, and in the end I had to hard power-off the console.

I've had other failures. The strip club seems also to freeze the game at the most inappropriate moments. It's very annoying.

I think I'm going to have to reinstall the game to the hard drive, which takes - as one can read elsewhere - an extraordinarily long time. And I've got GT5 Prologue, which is the old 'takes fucking ages to install' record holder. Sigh. What happened to the old console truth, that above all games absolutely must never, ever crash?

Updated 2008-05-03 19:36 BST: Unplugging the network cable fixes it. Don't know why, don't really care at this point.

At last, a proper Gran Turismo game available for the PS3. Well, almost: Gran Turismo 5 Prologue is as close as we'll get for at least a year.

First impressions: It takes a looooooong time to install this game. I'd expect that if I'd downloaded it; not when I've gone out and bought a piece of plastic with the game on. Before that, even, I got 'connection to the server could not be established'. More on this later.

After the installation - during which I had enough time to make a pot of fresh coffee (bean to cup), prepare some lunch, put some washing on, clean up and change my clothes - the game actually starts. Another failed server connection later, we're in.

And boy, does it look good.

After a good gawp at the intro video, and letting it fly me through what I thought was one of its circuits - somewhere in Germany or Austria, it reminded me of Hamlyn in Germany (yes, the Pied Piper place is a real town) - I thought it might be good to have, you know, a go. Turns out it wasn't a circuit at all, just a photogenic place to show off the cars. Oh well.

The first thing I must do, it says, is visit the dealerships and buy a car. That's familiar. Also familiar is the reality of not having enough money to buy a decent car. Irritatingly, all the obvious choices for a first halfway-useful car are just a few credits too much. No Scooby, no Mitzi, no Elise, oh wait... I can afford an RX-8! Oustanding - One throbbing, veiny mid-life-crisis mobile, comin' at ya!

Unreal Tournament 3 on the PS3 is finally available outside the USA. I've been playing it for just a few hours, but it looks great and plays really well.

I have it on the PC too, and while you'd expect that to look better - my PC costs a fair bit more than a PS3, and it's newer hardware - it's not such a big difference as I was expecting. It's great to see the Unreal Engine running full-on on the PS3.

It's hateful playing a first-person shooter with a SixAxis. It's so imprecise. That's not Epic's fault, of course.

Very impressed. Let's see how good it is after a week or so. On the PC, we're on 1.2 and the menus and bots are much better. PS3 is equivalent to PC 1.0, and that sucks in quite a few ways.

Just finished Uncharted: Drake's Fortune.

The Good: Beautiful game. Great sound design. Excellent animation ('look, he walks down the stairs properly!') Decent story.

The Bad: Gets a bit repetitive after a while, not to the same extent as Assassin's Creed though. The 'cursed' enemies are extremely annoying. Some bits are annoyingly difficult.

Verdict: Very good, just what the PS3 needed - a high-quality, original, exclusive title that would hold its own and look great on any platform.