In the extended build-up to the European launch of the PlayStation 3 in March, Sony will try to give as many people as possible hands-on experience of the PlayStation 3. But in the meantime, those of us who had the privilege of going to the Tokyo Games Show are among the first to have acquired hands-on experience of PS3 games operating on real PS3s (rather than developers’ kits). Sorry – we don’t want to sound like we’re bragging. And of course, we’d like to share our experience – although you should bear in mind that, in most cases, what we played are restricted demo versions of the games.

Resistance: Fall of Man

Insomniac’s first-person shooter will share the launch line-up limelight with the likes of MotorStorm, Formula One and maybe even Gran Turismo HD. We’re happy to report that it looks great, the control system is nicely sorted, the weaponry is satisfyingly over-the-top, the AI, as you would expect on the PS3, presents you with plenty of challenges and the storyline, in which post-WWII Europe has been invaded by aliens, and only England remains free, isn’t as cheesy as it could have been, bearing mind that the game is being developed in America. It’s without a doubt a top-notch fps, although perhaps it doesn’t break a vast amount of ground in gameplay terms. And it can be played by up to 40 people online, with innovative gameplay modes that see you capturing nodes and establishing ever-increasing territorial areas.

MotorStorm

We particularly enjoyed this mud-plugging driving game developed by British outfit Evolution Studios. It’s pretty uncomplicated stuff, which puts you at the wheel of various 4WD buggies as well as motorbikes, but the devil is in the detail, with a rigorous physics engine and cute touches such as the way in which your vehicle soon becomes encrusted in mud. Crash, and you’ll lose body panels (and that virtual mud with them). Motorcyclists can punch their rivals, a la the old EA game Road Rash, and driving fellow competitors off the road, is also a major part of the game. Overall, great fun, and impressive to look at.

Lair

This dragon-riding-and-shooting game surprised us by making sophisticated use of the motion-sensing controller, which is particularly well suited to flying games (WarHawk is the only other launch title that fully supports the controller’s abilities). It’s pretty hectic stuff, as you fly around on your dragon, wiping out vast amounts of ground-based troops with its fiery breath, and fighting off attacks from enemy dragons. We discovered that you can launch special moves with gestures – position yourself above an enemy dragon, for example, and jerk the controller vertically downwards, and you’ll swoop and knock off its rider. One of the more innovative titles in the launch line-up.

Formula One: Championship Edition

Not, perhaps, the most enticing of the launch titles, but we love F1, and had a good play. It’s all about the graphics and the handling, and this was pretty accessible from the go – meaning we were able clock some fairly competitive laps, quite quickly. One thing it highlighted was the analogue nature of the triggers – the harder you press them the more, say, you accelerate - and the fact that they are now bigger and easier to find.

The PS3 showcase also featured WarHawk, Eye of Judgment, Genji, Heavenly Sword and Ridge Racer 7 but, shamefully, we didn’t manage to play them. When we do get hands-on, we’ll update you, and when we start to get more intimate sessions with the PS3 games, we’ll bring you more in-depth write-ups.

This has just debuted on TV and in cinemas in North America. Best thing about it is the Brian Eno soundbed.

We hooked up Rob Fahey from Eurogamer.net with Sony’s head of worldwide studios, Phil Harrison, for a long and intense interview that will lead to a whole series of pieces to be published on Three Speech. Here’s the first, with Phil Harrison talking PS3 hardware.

If you were going to pick somewhere to work, this wouldn’t be a bad choice. We’re in a modern office near Oxford Circus in London, with tall glass windows all down one side which look out over the rooftops of Soho; in the distance, the London Eye turns slowly. Perhaps even more distracting than the view, though, is the giant plasma screen which dominates the office - and the PlayStation 3 which sits underneath it. Lots of offices in London have great views of the river or the city’s landmarks - very few, right now, have great views of Ridge Racer 7, which is what’s on screen at the moment.

We’re in Phil Harrison’s office, and we’re here to talk about the PS3. Sony may be a Japanese company at heart, but if you’ve got questions about the forthcoming console and its software, this is the right place to come. Since he was appointed as head of Sony’s worldwide studios - the guy in charge of software, in other words - Harrison has become the company’s straight talker. There are plenty of people you can talk to if you want visionary, non-specific babble about the entertainment systems of the future. You talk to Phil Harrison if you want a straight answer about why the hell Sony is insisting on a Blu-Ray drive for PS3, or what they were thinking when they dropped rumble from the pad.

So we ask those things…

First things first. Blu-Ray, the disc system which the PS3 uses, is probably the most controversial aspect of the console. The discs, which are the same size as DVDs, can hold either 25 or 50GB of data - compared to 4.7 or 9GB on DVDs. That’s great, but less great is the fact that the inclusion of the drive is believed to be responsible for much of the cost of the console, and Sony admits that Blu-Ray shortages are behind the decision to delay the European launch of PS3 to 2007. What’s more, Sony has been accused of putting the drive into the console just to drive sales of high-definition movies on Blu-Ray discs - effectively making consumers pay for a Hi-Def movie player in their console, whether they want one or not.

So what’s the real reason for Blu-Ray being in every PS3? Are people who just want to play games, and aren’t bothered about Blu-Ray movies, really going to see any benefits?

“Well, they’re going to get, in their console, not just the movie format but the data transport format - which will be at least the next ten years,” Harrison explains. “DVD is not sufficient capacity to power the kind of data consumption, or to feed the data consumption needs of Cell and RSX. It’s got nothing to do with movies. Just purely as a gameplay device, we need Blu-Ray to supply the kind of data that PS3 games use.”

“It’s not just about graphics - it’s about 7.1 audio, it’s about speech, it’s about having up to 1080p movies built into the game; it’s high res textures, it’s animation, it’s everything that goes into making a very rich and varied next-gen experience. Already, at our launch titles, we’re getting up close to the 25GB limit that we have on our Blu-Ray discs this year. Next year we’ll raise that to 50GB, and I’d expect that we’ll be getting close to that in the fairly near future as well.”

“Don’t take my word from it - there was a great quote from a guy from EA who said that whenever there’s a new disc format, you always struggle to think how developers will fill it, but they always do. I suppose that game development is like gas, it expands to fill the available space. Once you have that technical capability, the creative desire to exploit it follows very quickly thereafter.”

One of the things that people are concerned about is that discs will be filled with high-resolution video scenes rather than actual game content - which seems like a fair concern, since at the moment game creators seem to be fitting next-gen titles perfectly well onto DVDs. The question, then, is whether there’s relevant, interactive content that is going to need this sort of disc.

“Absolutely,” Harrison says. “I mean, not every game is going to fill 25 or 50GB. I completely accept that - but there will be games that require that this year, and will push that further in years to come. It’s not just, as you say, about movies - it’s about 7.1 audio, it’s about animation, it’s about high resolution textures. If you have a graphics chip capable of displaying the textures in a high enough resolution, the designers would want to exploit that benefit creatively.”

“So partly it’s visual, partly it’s sound, and partially it’ll be down to gameplay benefits as well - more levels, more detail, richer experiences. Also, I see nothing wrong with having non-interactive, full HD sequences as part of the game - that’s all part of the production value and the experience that you get when you buy the game. I don’t see that as a weakness at all.”

One spanner in the works, though, is Sony’s own announcement a few weeks ago that it’s going to be shipping some games where you buy a cheap disc with relatively little content on it, and then download more content over the network as you go along. Two titles like that are Singstar and Gran Turismo HD - which begs the question, what do you need a Blu-Ray disc for if you’re just going to be downloading everything and storing it on the PS3 hard drive? Doesn’t that make the whole Blu-Ray idea a bit, well, irrelevant?

Not so, says Harrison. “Both of the games that you cite there will have very large databases of content on the disc - I don’t know exactly how big today, but definitely way more than anything we can do on DVD,” he says. “Then, those games will be extended and expanded via downloadable content, which will be added to the user’s hard drive.”

“There will be games that start off relatively small, in terms of initial disc capacity, and then the users can extend and expand the experience by downloading content. What that allows us to do as a publisher is perhaps a year after, or two years after, we can take all of that downloadable content and put it onto the disc, and republish, or add value, or some other incentive, to the consumers who didn’t buy first time around - so that gives us plenty of future proof options for how we deliver content to users. All of that is only possible because of Blu-Ray.”

Out of space. Check back on Three Speech soon for Harrison’s reply to our questions about rumble in the PS3 pad - and why Sony has added a HDMI video port to the low-end PS3 system at the eleventh hour!

By Rob Fahey (Eurogamer.net)