For the past few years, I’ve listened to many XBox 360 owners explain why their console of choice was superior to the Playstation 3. And while some games – Dead Rising, Fable 2, and the upcoming Alan Wake for example – have made me wish that I owned a 360, for the most part I’ve been very happy with my PS3.

And whereas the Playstation 2 absolutely dominated the market with such titles as Shadow of the Colossus, God of War, and Katamari Damacy, the Playstation 3 has until recently had no such list.

But check this out.

Heavy Rain
I’ve written about Heavy Rain plenty. It’s a phenomenal interactive murder/mystery. I’ve already bought a second copy as a gift for a friend, largely because I needed to share the experience. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking the game up. It’s so choice.

LittleBigPlanet
I haven’t written about LittleBigPlanet on this site, largely because I haven’t played the game much, although we do own it. My wife, on the other hand, played through the game nearly to completion. I’m sure that I could lose myself in the game’s creation engine as I once did with Neverwinter Nights’ Aurora Engine creation studio. But for now, I’ll continue to resist.

Pixeljunk Monsters
My love for Pixeljunk Monsters seems to know no limits. Years after buying the game, I’m still playing it. And just a few weeks ago, I finally unlocked the second-to-last level in the expansion. It is very hard.

Trine
I know that there also exists a PC version on Steam, but Trine on the Playstation 3 is superior, if only because you can play the game with three players. It’s also the only game on which I’ve ever managed a platinum trophy. Not easy.

Uncharted 2
Everyone else seems to love this game more than I do, but I’ll admit that it’s a good game. I’m probably less than halfway through right now. I’ll have more to offer as I progress further.

In addition to the above, I’m interested to try the punishingly difficult Demon’s Souls, and I know I’ll soon pick up a copy of God of War 3. Also, as soon as The Last Guardian hits store shelves, I’m all over it.

Play Clockwords

Blosics works on a pretty basic physics theme: throw balls of different size at some blocks and knock the blocks off. Green blocks give you points, red blocks make you lose points. From there, the plot thickens.

Play Blosics 2

I’m a huge fan of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog. So when I got wind of this mock-up of Joss Whedon’s musical as an 8-bit video game, I was totally on board. Scroll down to watch it. And please, if you’ve never seen Dr. Horrible, at least watch the first of its three acts here. It’s less than eight minutes and you won’t regret it.

Ever heard of the 2009 movie Law Abiding Citizen? I hadn’t, although it looks pretty good. But then again, I’d been living on a mountain in the middle of nowhere for five years.

This fan-made trailer inserts Team Fortress 2 characters in the roles of the movie’s other characters. Pretty well done.

Steambirds is a steampunk turn-based strategy game in which you fly a squadron of fusion-powered biplanes fighting in an alternate universe World War I. You’ll take on dusters, balloons, and zeppelins. Each side plans their moves, and then those moves play out simultaneously. I played all the way up to 1950, and the game is a lot of fun.

Play Steambirds

I’m a fan of survival horror games. It’s no secret that Resident Evil 2 is my personal holy grail of survival horror, but I also enjoyed Eternal Darkness, and even Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth had its moments. But as I’ve written before, survival horror as a genre is dying. In the most recent “survival horror” games, the emphasis is on directly confronting the enemies. As such, games like Dead Space and Resident Evil 5 aren’t what I’d categorize as survival horror. They’re great games, but they’re shooters.

Part of the reason for the shift may be that true survival horror games can be frustrating. When I tried to play Resident Evil: Code Veronica X a few years back, I got halfway through the game and had to stop playing because I had no healing supplies and no ammunition, and it was impossible for me to progress. So I restarted the game from the beginning, being more careful this time. I got further, but once more I found myself stuck with no supplies, and so I had to stop playing. I never finished the game, and that’s frustrating.

Scarcity of resources is a big part of traditional survival horror, as is the ability to avoid enemies rather than confronting them directly. In fact, the lack of experience points or loot encourages players to run from enemies, since there’s no reward in defeating them – only the possibity of being injured. And motivating players to flee rather than fight makes the game’s foes feel more frightening.

But one of the ways that games have evolved over the past decade is by better respecting players’ time. Diego Doumecq had an excellent post that explores this: “The games of yesterday were more directly designed for kids…. (They had) …all the time in the world”. I’ll admit – when I was eleven years old, playing Realm of Impossibility and Legacy of the Ancients on my Commodore 64, I had all the time in the world too. Diego writes about the pacing of games: about grinding, and having to repeat challenging tasks over and over until you manage to do it without your character dying.

Ever since video games have existed, the consequence of failure has remained consistent: you die, and you have to retry. Thus, a player finds himself repeating the same section of gameplay over and over, and this can grow extremely frustrating. Either you’re defending Nova Prospekt from an assault by The Combine over and over, reloading your progress each time, or you’re replaying Ghosts and Goblins over and over, starting from level one each time.

The first I’d seen of an alternative was when I played Heavy Rain. It’s the only game of its kind I’ve ever played where there is no Game Over screen as a result of player failure, and where you never have to reload a game as a result of failing. There are certainly consequences, and game characters can certainly die, but you’re never forced to repeat a scene in the game because you failed. As I’ve written before, this makes for a very different type of game experience, and I strongly feel that assigning this kind of irrevocability to a player’s choices and failures makes for a far more engaging game experience. In Heavy Rain, when I was playing through a scene in which my character was fighting for her life, I was anxious. I was sitting bolt upright in my chair and trying my damnest because I knew that if I screwed up and that character died, the character was dead. No reloading and trying again. And that is the sentiment that survival horror games need to capture.

I’m not saying that creating this type of game would be easy. Even if you create a cast of six or ten characters, it’s easily possible that all of them could die, and then what happens? But if the game designer combines an approach where less plot-critical failures carry consequences lighter than death (end up in the hospital, fail to get that really nice shotgun) and where the difficulty is carefully moderated to remain challenging without becoming deadly except during a small number of set pieces, this approach could work very well.

I don’t know whether the makers of survival horror games will latch onto this mechanic, but I’d absolutely love to see it happen.

It’s been up for some time now, but I feel a need to point out Brandon’s review of Heavy Rain on Gameshark.com for those of you who may need additional nudging to get a copy of the game.

Here’s my own review: “WOOO!”

I bought a Nintendo DS Lite on day one, and as you may have read back in 2006, the day one Nintendo DS Lites had an issue with hinges cracking. My own DS has had a cracked hinge since 2006, but tonight it just got a lot worse. After a session of Retro Game challenge, I folded the DS just like I always do, and crrunch. Check this out. Not good.

It looks like Nintendo may repair issues related to cracked hinges for free, so I guess I need to get in touch with them and find out.

Continuity is amongst the coolest of the browser-based flash games I’ve posted here. It combines basic platforming of the kind seen in N+ with a sliding puzzle game. The game won an independent games festival, and rightfully so. It’s wicked creative.

Play Continuity