Ahh, the Pee Ess Triple. Ain’t talkin’ bout that Wii, so to speak, with respect to Mr. Chad Warden.
Are we talking “Good PS3 Exclusives”, or games that particularly perform well on the Triple?
Because if we’re looking at games that use the hardware to the fullest extent, no one was afforded more resources to squeeze every last drop out of that thing than Naughty Dog, or so is my understanding. Obviously Ridge Racer 7 is a huge one, a launch game running at native 1080p and a locked 60fps. It’s a noticeable improvement over Ridge Racer 6 in a lot of ways, though it is still largely the same game with more content. It has different lighting techniques and color palettes, menus, music, all that fun stuff to help differentiate the aesthetic a little bit, but it’s still that game at the core. Funnily enough, Ridge Racer 6 is backwards compatible on newer Xboxes now, so you can play that one in native 4K at 60fps nowadays. No idea what the state of Ridge 7 is in RCPS3 at the moment but I’d have to assume it’s a solved problem by now right?
Anyway, Visceral was always really good at making sure the PS3 port of multi-platform games was rock solid. Dead Space 1 and 2 as well as Dante’s Inferno are all super stable on PS3. Some of Sega’s simpler releases from the mid-00s are dependable as well, like Virtua Tennis 3, which runs at 1080p60 on both 360 and PS3, I believe.
Alone In The Dark: Inferno (the 2008 reboot) is actually best on PS3 as well! That game’s got some really cool ideas imo, and the fire propagation tech is super impressive. All the reasons it was panned at the time are reasons it’s Cool, Now, imo. Same goes for Vin Diesel’s The Wheelman, while my brain is in that space.
Square-Enix’s output was hit or miss depending on the title. Drakengard 3 is notoriously unstable, though it emulates very well now. But Final Fantasy XIII is a technical masterwork on the platform, and the cutscenes are beautifully uncompressed HD video files.
That era of Ratchet & Clank games are super pretty, but they are all capped at 30fps, unfortunately. Not the end of the world imo, but that series is all 60 before and after the PS3 era so it stands out kind of oddly if you’re familiar with the newer or older games.
I still think Metal Gear Solid 4 is one of the best-looking games ever made, though performance is admittedly all over the place.
Level 5 was doing some great art direction at the time, Ni No Kuni and Eternal Sonata are gorgeous on PS3 and run well.
Killzone 2’s visual direction and post-processing effects are staggering and impress to this day, but the built-in input latency makes the game feel so sluggish and heavy in a way that’s unresponsive and disconnects the kinesthetic experience of shooting big ol guns at big ol dudes, so it’s a bit of give and take.
The only FromSoftware game that really performs well on PS3 is 3D Dot Game Heroes, though I still recommend checking out Armored Core: For Answer and Demon’s Souls if you haven’t already.
Don’t sleep on WipEout HD and HD Fury! Those games are gorgeous!! Though they’re best played in the Omega Collection that released later on PS4, so . . .
While we’re back on the subject of racing, the track deformation in Sega Rally Revo and the Motorstorm series is incredibly cool to see in action, but Gran Turismo 5 and 6 and their various versions (HD Concept demo, etc.) are ridiculously impressive for their time.
If you’re down to CFW that bad boy and run some games that are no longer available for purchase, OutRun Online Arcade, Afterburner Climax, Sega Rally Online, and GTI Club are all fantastic. GTI Club is a bit goofy and wonky (intentionally so, it’s nearly a Choro Q spiritual successor in how it handles), but the others are super fast and snappy. Afterburner Climax is a trip. I didn’t know video games could move that fast when it came out lol. The render pipeline under the hood on that thing must be astoundingly efficient.
Edit: Remember when they remade GoldenEye as a Call of Duty-like on the Wii? A year later it got a significant upgrade (you could almost call it a remake) on the 360 and PS3, and weirdly the PS3 is the dominant platform there.
Fun fact: if you google “60fps ps3 games” you’ll find an awful lot of forum posts of people listing games that run at 30 or indeed much lower in the effort to fight some kind of weird console war or whatever! Cool cool cool cool cool.
