Heavenly Sword. The first game I ever played on PS3, and probably hands down my favorite to this day. I just fell in love with the characters - two playable females with quality voice acting (Anna Trov from 'Fringe' is lead, along with a child character that you feel protective about), great villains and boss fights (Andy Serkis from LOTR, also co-writer and director). And the gameplay was new (to me) and quite satisfying - button combo fighting with a sword that also had power and ranged attacks, but easy to learn and not overly complicated or button mashing in style (the key to success was to block and LISTEN for the sword clash, and then hit the counter-strike button). Also mixing it up were these awesome slow-motion, bow-and-arrow / catapult guidance sequences over huge distances, really neat stuff. There were also unfortunately a few QTE sequences to annoy me, but nothing too bad.

EDIT: By the way, there was a five episode prequel animated series to set up the story that you can watch here. (Oh man, it still sends chills down my spine...)

It was early in the PS3 generation, so the game might not look the best these days, and it is short, maybe 10 hours or so, but worth checking out I think. The same developers went on to make Enslaved: Odyssey To The West, which is now on PC/Steam. I've yet to play that though (too many games).

Little hard to say without knowing preferences, but games I like that have been exclusive to the PS3 were:

Resistance: Fall of Man, Resistance 2, Resistance 3:
All three are incredibly fun and really creative. The first one plays like a more action-sci fi game like Quake 4, 2 does play more similarly to a Call of Duty but is still a really good and fun game, and 3 is kind of hard to say. I absolutely love the game, but its health system is the fairly standard out of 100 with health packs variety (good and bad. Good, keeps things simple. Bad, the hybrid regenerating/health packs from FoM were better.) and the guns are a little less awesome, but they upgrade and are still very cool.

Yakuza: Dead Souls.
I imagine it plays like Yakuza, but it's the only one I own so I can't say for certain. Either way it's an over the top relatively open zombie killing game with hostess clubs and collectibles and stuff like that. I really like the plot, I thought it was a good combination of seriousness and lightheartedness. The gameplay takes getting used to but after an hour or two it gets really fun.

Dragon's Dogma:
It's gonna be out on PC sometime soon, but it's awesome on PS3, but it's also on 360.

This is not a recommendation, but I really dislike Uncharted: drake's Fortune anymore. It has an inkling of a decent game sometimes but far too many times the answer to "Why am I playing this game?" was "To beat it so it doesn't loom over me."
How long is Heavenly Sword, roughly? It's a game I have wanted but kind of want to put off for a while if it's much longer than a typical action game. Also, it doesn't have any mandatory install stuff, does it? I didn't think it would but there isn't much space left on my hard drive so I wanna be cautious.

I wouldn't be concerned about it, its just a matter of getting used to it, like anything else.

Learning to master the controls of a game is part of the fun for me, part of the gaming experience. In racing games for example, my main genre, you constantly need to adjust your mechanical and technical skills to suit new cars, set-ups and tracks. This is true whether you are playing with a full racing wheel set-up or with a gamepad. I use the same reasoning for all other genres.

Seconded. I've played Resistance 1 and Resistance: Burning Skies (on Vita), and thought both were up there with the top FPSs I've played (even though "critics" bashed the Vita one; I never listen to them). The range of weapons is the best feature, really inventive, with great secondary fire options - like the one you can tag enemies with a homing beacon and then fire around corners. Lots of tactical options switching to the right weapon at the right time.

As for the discussion of playing FPS on consoles, two things helped me a lot to adjust. 1) Do not bother trying to aim left/right with the aiming thumb stick, instead strafe left/right with the movement thumb stick to line up shots - FAR better accuracy. (It also has the advantage of moving away from incoming fire). Only use the aiming stick to point in the general direction and line up shots vertically. 2) Go into the options and LOWER the aiming sensitivity. I find the aiming defaults for most games way too sensitive, that you end up over-shooting in the heat of battle. I know the feeling! :D They are solid and well-made games for sure, the trouble (for me) is re-re-playing them to get ALL the trophies. I still have a few left on U1 after two complete plays... <*argh*> ;)

(And now with PS4 remasters they expect us to start all over again?) :\ Let me have a look... The disc version I have uses up 2068MB (~2GB) on my PS3 - not sure if that is just the install or a patch. As I mentioned, the play time is pretty short. I would average it at 10 hours but it depends on if you want to master the levels? Just playing for the story could be less hours, trying to get all the glyphs per level and replaying on Hell difficulty could end up double. (Incidentally, Hell difficulty somehow makes it a bit easier to get all the glyphs, so there is no need to master it the first time)

Dead Souls is great for fanservice but that's about it. Honestly, I recommend getting into the series although Y3 has god awful story with awful plot twists that throws everything from 2 out of the window. Reason being writer switch.

Also features tons of cut content.

4 continues with bad story but 5 has it better and is overall better than 5. I can't shill Yakuza 5 enough for people to purchase since it's a great game and it can actually make a difference in localisation of the series in the future. Even if Ishin gets passed there'd be 0, Kiwami and 6 to look forward to.

Ni No Kuni

Thanks for the Heavenly Sword advice. Being a PC guy on FPSs I still think that Resistance is among my favorite game series of the past ten or so years, and I played the latter two this past year. My brother got a PSP recently and I'm probably gonna get either a Via or a Vita TV soon so hopefully Resistance works there but if not I'll get a Vita one of these days and I'll be sure to play it.


I really, really wanna get into Yakuza proper, but it seems like it'd take a while to go through them all. I have been thinking about getting 4 or 5 anyway and seeing from there if I'll get the first ones or try and enjoy them out of order.

5 is honestly the better choice (hopefully the avatar sale leaks mean it's coming fifth of November) but 4 isn't bad by any means even with its awful plot twists.

Hopefully Tales of Zestiria will be coming here on GOG.com.