PS3 Introduction Part 1 - The PSN Store

Well, as a few of my friends are getting PlayStation 3's, I thought that this would be a good time to create a little introduction guide that I hope other people will also find useful.

There is the PlayStation Network Store under the Network tab, I believe, and this is where you can download wallpapers, themes, videos, games, and demos. There are a TON of demos out there for a bunch of games. I'll share with you some of my favorite downloadable PSN (PlayStation Network) games. I'll start with some of my favorites.

• PAIN - I do not think that PAIN has a demo. Its a game where you take a guy on a giant slingshot and fling him into things and try and cause as much damage to the area as possible. I have this game and find it HILARIOUS. The humor is VERY juvenile, so if you find watching people do stupid things and get hurt funny or if you think that fart jokes are funny, etc then you will most likely enjoy this game. The game as a game is very difficult and quite challenging to try and get all the in-game trophies as well as the PSN trophies. (PSN trophies are PlayStation's response to the XBox's "gamerscore", not all games support Trophies yet as its still a new feature.) - $10
  
• Super StarDust HD - Demo is available - This is a "twin stick shooter", play the demo if you don't know what that type of game is. Very fast paced, intense and is a TON of fun. $10
  
• LocoRoco Cocorechho! - I don't think that there's a demo, but if you liked LocoRoco on the PSP then you'll probably like this game. You control a butterfly that influences where the LocoRoco move. Includes all the adorable cuteness of LocoRoco. $10?
  
• PixelJunk Monsters - Demo available - This game is f'n awesome and WILL kick your ass and hand it to you. It supports a 2 player co-op mode so you and Stephen can play together. It's a tower defense game and is terribly addictive. $10
• PixelJunk Eden - Demo available - uh... I don't know how to explain this game. Even watching videos of this game doesn't help. Go play the demo and you will understand the awesomeness of this game. $10
• Bionic Commando Rearmed - F'n awesome remake of the original Bionic Commando for the NES. $10 and there is a demo available.
• Go! Sudoko - Demo available - It's sudoko... enough said. The demo is actually like a starter pack. The various packs of puzzles for each difficulty mode are like $2.99.
  

There are also demos for disc based games:

• Motorstorm - Awesome, arcadey racing game
• Resistance: Fall of Man - Great story line to this game, First Person Shooter
• Civilization Revolution - A console specific version of Civ.
• Folklore - An RPG that is quite interesting.
• Uncharted: Drake's Fortune - A really good 3rd person adventure/shooter game.
• Burnout Paradise - F'n sweet game. My most played game probably.

There are a ton more in the demo's category, I just can't recall off the top of my head. All the demo's are free to download. The video trailers of games are also free and most of the themes are free. Just this week they started to have "premium themes" that cost money. The PSN Store is updated on Thursday evenings about 5-6pm EST. Be sure to check out http://blog.us.playstation.com as they have lots of good info on all things PSP and PS3 related.

I'm sure that the demos I've listed above will keep you busy for hours once you download them. Speaking of which, the PS3 has a "Folding @ Home" or "Life with PlayStation" icon on it in the Network tab, i think. This is kind of like a highly polished version of the Wii's News channel with cloud data for the globe obtained every couple of hours, webcams looking at various cities, current weather for those cities, and news articles related to that city. That's all in the "Live Channel" of the application. The Folding@Home channel is where it shows you the current progress of its participation with the Folding@home program, a distributed computing application to help the University of Stanford gather information on causes/cures for several diseases. You can set a unique name, so you can keep track of how much you've contributed, through the "Current Channel" menu when you press Triangle. Anytime the "Life with PlayStation" application is running it will automically start "folding", as we call it. I queue up a ton of stuff to download then fire up Life with Playstation and come back in a little bit. It will download the demos/videos while it folds. Just be sure that if you do this, be sure that your PS3 has room to breathe (i.e. not in a closed cabinet) as the folding uses a TON of CPU usage so it generates a bunch of heat. You might hear the fan on the PS3 kick up a gear or two, which is quite normal for it under heavy load. They've designed this thing quite well, the fan has like 5 speeds to it, the last of which sounds like a hair dryer from what I've been told, and if it still continues to get hotter it will shut itself off to prevent damage and won't turn back on until it's cooled off enough.

The PSN store is one of my favorite features because it's allowed me to try a bunch of games before buying and a lot of the downloadable games are really unique. Sony is striving for a "quality over quantity" when it comes to the downloadable games and there are very few "bleh" games out there, and those that are "meh" are usually less that $5.

Above image taken from http://us.playstation.com