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This week saw the release of Killzone 2 for the Playstation 3. I’ve been playing it for a few days and I have to say it’s quite the intense experience, very gritty and raw. Even the Sony-hating Kotaku gave it a “must have” designation. So, to give you a taste, here is the TV trailer for the game.

Click through and you can see it in high def. And if you like first person’s shooters and have a PS3, I say get it. And if you don’t have a PS3, then why the hell not?!

Today saw the somewhat-highly anticipated game, Flowers, for the PS3 appear on the Playstation Network. The aim of the game is to control the wind which causes flowers to lose their petals and fly through the air and around the landscape. It’s not killing, it’s not racing, but it is relaxing and something different. Maybe it’s a game that becomes art? Anyway, it’s available to buy today if the following trailer piques your interest.

Ooh, the word ‘upskirt’ should get me some hits! Last week I raved about Hot Shots Golf 5, coming soon to a PS3 near you and in doing so I mentioned the short skirts some of the female players wear. Well, thanks to perverts with too much time on their hands (there was a joke here but I narrowly avoided making it) it is apparently possible to check out what these girls are wearing on the course. Not sure which is crazier – the fact that someone went to the effort to find out if you could look up the skirts, or the fact that the Japanese would code for that eventuality. Anyway, here for your viewing pleasure: Hot Shots Golf pantsu:

All this week I’ve been hooked on Hot Shots Golf 5 for the PS3:

Right now it’s a Japan-only title and that to me is most of it’s charm. Check out this video trailer and see what I mean. You’ve got the crazy looking characters, and even some cute chicks in non-LPGA short skirts and stockings but its the music and the manic Japanese voices that make it so much fun. The courses are gorgeous – ostriches were walking across the green yesterday when I was trying to sink a putt on an Africa-themed course – and the control mechanisms straightforward.

I’m really not sure what is going on outside the golf since all the menus and announcements are in Japanese but that’s it’s charm. The US version comes out October 1st and I think it’s a must buy, though I wonder what it will sound like in English. I’m told that previous versions did a great job but we’ll see.

Well, not quite, but last week version 1.6 of the PS3 firmware trickled out to users and contained the infamous Folding@home application. If you’ve not heard of it, basically it adds your machine to a huge network of computers each running a piece of a simulation that in some way it is hoped will contribute to cures for diseases. The simulations are so huge that it could never be done with just one machine, or even one institution, but perhaps with millions around the world…

Anyway, if you have a PS3 you can enable it to run some folding of its own during its idle moments and therefore feel good about yourself. The interesting thing is the power of the beast as these figures show:

Now, many of the Windows machines are probably old pieces of junk but the difference between PS3 and Windows performance is huge. Its also beating out the Macs pretty good, too.

Yesterday Sony unveiled the much-leaked, controversy-causing, Home product for the PS3. I saw this last summer and was pretty impressed with what they had already, and in this trailer it looks like they have gone a lot further. Part Mii, part second-life, parts unknown, there will surely be many people who prefer to spend their entire life at “Home” rather than with the rest of us. So sit back, watch the trailer and be impressed. Oh, and it doesn’t hurt that there’s a sexy English chick doing the voiceover.

I’ve had the PS3 a couple of weeks now, played it more than I expected but less than the price tag deserves. There’s no doubt that the graphics are slick, all the games look very nice in high-def (well, 720p anyway) and its clear that the machine can do a lot more than anyone is asking of it right now.

Resistance of Man: Great first person shooter, the atmosphere it creates is perfect and the online match making feature is great for finding people to play with. Probably my favourite so far.

NBA ’07: Only played this for 10 minutes, couldn’t get the hang of the controls and haven’t put it back in the machine since. I’ll give it another go but I wasn’t taken with it like the others.

Genji: Not usually my kind of game but the graphics are great. Sound gets real annoying during a long fight, though. Definitely better than I expected.

Blazing Angels: Lots of fun here flying old WW2 planes and taking care of Jerry. Some vertigo-inducing maneuvers to be had, great graphics on screen. Flying by the sixaxis controller motion was impossible, though. Probably my joint favourite with Resistance.

Worthy Mentions: The demo versions of Motorstorm and Gran Tourismo HD were very good indeed, the former being lots of fun, the latter just looked gorgeous.

Sony needs to fix two things fast, though. First, downloads need to happen in the background. It is no fun to be told the system needs to update and then not be able to play for the next two hours. Seriously, background downloading is old technology. Second, the algorithm for choosing the TV resolution needs to be changed to pick the best one available for the game. If you don’t have 1080p Resistance will look best in 720p but, unless I tell it not to, the PS3 chooses 1080i for everything. Can I tell the difference? Probably not, but its definitely something that should be changed.

One birthday present I know I am getting today – my PS3, at least according to the UPS tracking website. Of course I am not at home to see it until Friday night but it should be waiting for me when I get there. I am torn between keeping it or selling it on to a friend. It would be cool to have one but, not being home much, it is an expensive toy for something that I wouldn’t get to play with very often. I’ll probably at least set it up to see it in its full high def glory, playing Resistance on a 51″ LCD will definitely beat playing it here in the office on the piece of s*$t TV I have it attached to.

And for those of you who wish to add me to their buddy list, my handle is aPetulantMarmot. See you on the killing fields.

You know things are getting desperate when you have to put nekkid chicks in your ebay auction in order to sell your item. And isn’t the PS3 sexy enough??

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Since I installed the latest version of Firefox on my Mac Mini this weekend I am having to force quit it every 15 minutes or so, just freezes up for no good reason. A little investigation of the forums suggested it was related to the anti-phishing feature so I disabled that but it already froze again. Maybe this is the time to switch to Safari or Opera?

In other news, I see that the ebay auction prices for PS3 and Wii are coming down. Most of the PS3 auctions were in the $900-$1400 range which is still a tidy profit but not the crazyness we saw on launch day.