I've been living with the PlayStation 3 for the month of October, and the question I keep coming back to is this: if you're starting a PS3 collection, where on earth do you begin? The machine was home to some absolutely amazing games — Uncharted, Gran Turismo, God of War, Metal Gear Solid, The Last of Us — and that's before you even touch the multiplatform releases of that generation.
I could have just listed the five highest-rated games and called it a day. But where's the fun in that? Instead I picked five categories, each one representing something different about the PlayStation 3 and what made it stand out: the biggest-selling exclusive, a critics' favourite, the most innovative, an indie classic, and a multiplatform game that was actually better on Sony's machine.
And before anyone furiously types "where's GTA?" into the comments — yes, GTA IV and V were huge on PS3, GTA V in particular. But you could play them on the 360 too, and for most of this list I'm interested in games that made owning a PS3 feel a little bit special. No, I'm not including Hannah Montana: The Movie either. That would just be unfair on the other five.
The bestseller: Gran Turismo 5
Gran Turismo and PlayStation go together like fish and chips — or peanut butter and jelly for my North American friends. Or, more accurately, like a racing game and spending many hours fiddling with the suspension on a second-hand Nissan Skyline you picked up cheap.
By the time it arrived on the 24th of November 2010, four years after the console launched, expectations were huge. Prologue had whetted our appetites, Polyphony Digital had been working on it for years, and when it landed it was enormous: over a thousand cars, dozens of circuits and layouts, dynamic weather on selected tracks, night racing, online multiplayer, and — for the first time in the main series — proper vehicle damage. Well, kind of. Some cars took a fair amount of punishment while others seemed to be constructed from a material completely impervious to collision. Maybe it's the same stuff they make supermarket trolleys out of. There was also that odd split between gorgeous premium cars and standard models carried over from earlier games.
None of it dented the sales. It shifted 11.95 million copies, which makes it the best-selling PS3 exclusive by a distance — and the second best-selling PS3 game of any kind, behind only Grand Theft Auto V. The PS3 may have struggled to establish itself early on, but Gran Turismo was still absolutely a system-selling franchise: ambitious, occasionally frustrating, and utterly obsessed with cars.
The critics' choice: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
If you want to point to the moment the PlayStation 3 started to fulfil its potential, Uncharted 2 is a very strong candidate. Released in October 2009, Naughty Dog's second Nathan Drake outing took everything that worked in the first game — which wasn't a bad game at all — polished it, expanded it, and then threw Drake off a cliff out of a train for good measure.
That opening is still one of the most memorable introductions to any game I've played, full stop. Dangling from a wrecked carriage halfway down a mountain, wondering how on earth you got there. And that's only the beginning.
Think Indiana Jones, if Indiana Jones spent more time shooting people and less time worrying about archaeological preservation.
It scored 96 on Metacritic, one of the highest-rated games on the entire system. More importantly, it changed the conversation. Developers had spent years complaining about how difficult the PS3 was to build for. Naughty Dog showed what happened when a talented studio really got to grips with that architecture — the machine wasn't just keeping up, it could deliver something genuinely spectacular.
The most innovative: Heavy Rain
Released in February 2010, this was Quantic Dream blurring the line between games and interactive cinema — something we saw attempted on the Mega CD last month, but this is where it starts to make far more sense. Whatever you think of the end result, you have to admire the ambition.
Four playable characters — Ethan Mars, Madison Paige, Norman Jayden and Scott Shelby — the mystery of the Origami Killer, a dark and atmospheric thriller full of difficult decisions, uncomfortable moments and the occasional bit of acting that makes you wonder if everyone was reading from the same script. What made it fascinating was how it handled choice: characters could die permanently and the story carried on without them. There wasn't always a game over screen waiting when you made a mistake — sometimes you just had to live with the consequences, which frankly sounds a lot like adulthood.
The controls were unusual too. Nudging the analogue stick to open a fridge, holding several buttons at once, physically shaking the controller to shake a bottle of orange juice before you drank it. Sometimes it worked beautifully; other times you were desperately trying to remember which combination opened the fridge. It was originally a PS3 exclusive, which is why it's here, though it did eventually reach PS4 in 2016 and PC in 2019. Its approach to interactive storytelling remains divisive, but it proved big-budget console games could try something radically different. Not every experiment needs to be perfect to matter, and I'm glad this one exists.
The indie classic: Journey
After all that murdering and mystery and shouting at small children in shopping centres — if you've played Heavy Rain you'll know exactly what I mean — here's something more relaxing. And something I'd almost completely forgotten about.
Journey arrived in March 2012 from thatgamecompany, the studio behind Flow and Flower, and it might just be the most beautiful game on the PS3. It genuinely is a work of art. It always felt to me like the Ico of its era. You're a mysterious robed figure crossing an enormous desert towards a distant mountain. No dialogue, very little explanation, no map smothered in icons. Just a destination and the freedom to discover the world yourself.
Then there's the multiplayer. Occasionally you meet another player making the same journey. You can't speak to them, you don't know who they are, and you communicate only through little musical chimes — and somehow that creates a surprisingly powerful connection. Two strangers helping each other across a desert. Rather lovely, especially when most online multiplayer involves a twelve-year-old on the other side of the world questioning your parentage.
It won numerous awards, and Austin Wintory's soundtrack went one better than that: at the 2013 ceremony it became the first video game score ever nominated for a Grammy. It lost to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which is hardly a disgrace. Not bad for a game where you spend most of your time wandering about in a big red scarf. It's short — about two hours — and that's exactly why it works. It doesn't outstay its welcome.
One caveat for physical collectors: it launched digitally, with physical editions including the Journey Collector's Edition coming later. I've got it in my PS4 library and I can't find my PS3 copy anywhere. Expect to pay £25–£30 for a physical copy in CEX; you might do better on eBay.
Better on PS3: Final Fantasy XIII
Not the catchiest category title, I know. Multiplatform development wasn't always kind to Sony's console — the 360 was generally easier to develop for and plenty of games looked and ran better on Microsoft's machine. But there were exceptions.
Final Fantasy XIII launched in Japan as a PS3 exclusive in December 2009 and reached Europe and North America in March 2010 on both consoles — with a noticeable gap between the two. The PS3 version ran at native 720p; pixel-counters put the 360 version at 1024×576, upscaled, which left it visibly softer. And the cinematics were the bigger story: Square Enix fitted the whole thing onto a single 50GB Blu-ray, while the 360 release was squeezed across three DVDs with the video compressed to suit. In a game where presentation is such a huge part of the experience, that matters.
I won't pretend it was universally loved — it wasn't, and I wasn't a fan myself. It was criticised for its linear structure, its lengthy introduction and the feeling that you spent an awful lot of time walking down corridors. Very beautiful corridors, admittedly. But corridors nonetheless. It does have spectacular environments, a distinctive combat system and an ambitious story, it's cheap to pick up now, and it's proof that when a game was built with Sony's hardware firmly in mind, the results could be very different.
What I left out
Loads. The Last of Us, God of War III, Metal Gear Solid 4, LittleBigPlanet, Demon's Souls, Resistance, Killzone, Ratchet & Clank, and yes, GTA IV and V. I haven't forgotten them. The point was never that these are the only five PS3 games worth owning — far from it. I wanted five games that each represent something important about the console and its generation, which I think is a far more compelling way to build a collection than simply buying the five highest review scores. I genuinely wrangled with picking just one Naughty Dog game; a top five Naughty Dog list would have been the easy option.
So — what would your five be? Same categories, different winners? I'd love to know.