MLB 11 The Show
With all due respect to the MLB 2K series, SCEA's The Show is the best baseball game around. The photo-real stadiums, fantastic pitching, and the overall presentation add up to a killer app for baseball lovers. If you're an MLB nut, the PS3 is the system to buy.
The Uncharted series
The three Uncharted games add up to the most rollicking, cinematic action gaming trilogy seen this generation. Even though the games have been steadily improving in their style, culminating in this fall's Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, the consistently good voice acting and storytelling make this an excellent series to play from the beginning. These are also games tailor-made for showing off on a big-screen TV and booming audio system.
Metal Gear Solid 4
Hideo Kojima's unique stealth-gaming masterpiece remains a PlayStation 3 exclusive, making this the one notable disc-based game on our list that doesn't come from SCEA. It's still unparalleled.
Heavy Rain
It's hard to explain Heavy Rain unless you've played it. Dark, gritty, and dripping in noir, it plays like an interactive crime saga with dashes of flat-out weirdness. When the suspense and the gripping soundtrack kick into overdrive during certain sequences, you'll feel palpable dread.
LittleBigPlanet 2
Sony's answer to Super Mario is really something else entirely. The Media Molecule-created world of LittleBigPlanet has an astounding creation engine and thousands of user-made levels to explore, which range from Monty Python-esque weird to epic testaments of effort. Go with the recent sequel for the best set of creation tools.
God of War 3
You can always go back and play the first two God of War games (they were rereleased on the PlayStation 3 on one compilation disc), but for an experience that lives up to the scale and graphical prowess the PS3 has always promised, skip right to God of War 3. You'll have no regrets whatsoever.
Killzone 3
First-person shooters are a crowded landscape nowadays, but the third in the Killzone series is as good as the best of this year's batch. Both single and multiplayer modes are deep and challenging.
InFamous and InFamous 2
A creative leap into superhero storytelling, InFamous follows the creation of a brand-new electricity-throwing superhero, Cole McGrath. The comic bookish overtones are what make this open-world game the most compelling; both the original and the sequel are worth checking out.
Ico and Shadow of the Colossus Collection
The PlayStation 2 had two beautiful, minimalist and utterly revolutionary games in its library, both created by Fumito Ueda. One, Ico, followed a boy and a girl across a vast desolate castle as they solved puzzles. The other, Shadow of the Colossus, is equally vast and desolate, but focuses on a lone man who ventures to kill tremendous stone monsters on a Zelda-like quest. Both have been remastered and made 3D TV compatible in this long-awaited PS3 compilation.
Gran Turismo 5
The car museum: that's how the Gran Turismo series is best remembered, besides being a physics-immaculate racer. Some newer racers might be more visceral and handle car damage more realistically, but Gran Turismo 5 and its arsenal of real-world cars is still one of the best car-fetishist games ever made--and it's one of the best 3D-compatible PS3 games, too.
The Ratchet & Clank series
Ratchet & Clank have hung around since the PS2 days. The quirky sci-fi action game stands out on the PlayStation 3 for being one of the few family-friendly exclusive games. The best might be Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack In Time, but the recent Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One focuses on co-op multiplayer.
PSN indie games: Flower, etc
You'd be remiss if you missed visiting PSN and downloading some the excellently curated games that are PlayStation 3 exclusives. Thatgamecompany's Flower was one of the most talked-about games of 2009, and it's still worth experiencing. Other notables include Wipeout HD, Pixeljunk Shooter 2, and Super Stardust HD.
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