Playstation 3 games overview.

What are the Playstation 3 games like at the moment? The short answer is - still not good enough.

The troubles appear to lie in multi-format games and the fact the XBox can still be deemed the better console to work with. While this leads to things like the vertical tearing I mentioned in TimeShift or the occasional slideshow frame rate of The Orange Box sometimes the quality of a product can be seen in the little things that you don't even realise are there.

The Playstation 3 has a number of nifty little widgets that an owner might not even see, pop in a disc and not have it autoplay and it should change the background wallpaper and even play some appropriate music, the same goes for the cache data the game might save to the hard drive and even the savegame files.

Let's start with Resistance: Fall of Man a PS3 only title, it change the wallpaper... and that's it, not impressed.
Same goes for Ratchet and Clank from the same studio.
TimeShift also changes the wallpaper, but also plays some music. Well some might call it music it's a short weapon tone that's very badly looped and all the save files are just title screen icons.
The Orange Box is better, wallpaper change and the theme music from Episode 2 which I could just listen to by itself. The cache data does the same thing, the save files have a in-game snapshot of when it was saved except for the quick-saves, which features only the Half-Life lamda symbol. Now if I mention that QuickSaves are a PS3 only feature of this multi-console game...
Onto the best - Heavenly Sword another PS3 only title and it does things in style, background change, title music, and a video icon playing the trailer for the game on both disc and cache data.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and The Simpsons Game reveal their real roots in that they use no cached data at all with everything being streamed off the disc. Now considering the XBox360 houses a 12x DVD player meaning you get a 132 Mbit/s throughput whereas Sony have a 2x Blu-ray player with a 76 Mbit/s throughput; this means data access and thus loading is slower. This seems odd when you consider the default hard-drive in the PS3 has a 336 Mbit/s throughput.

So why not use the hard-drive? Because the game was designed to run on consoles that don't have one and the programmers obviously couldn't be bothered to change it.

And that's the state of play at the moment, the games just aren't using the full capacity of the PS3 compared to the XBox360. This may have to do with the programming environment, but can also be laid at the feet that the PS3 is simply younger then it's competitor.

However this might be changing with the forthcoming release of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, which is tempting even me a person who hates race games.