I am currently coming down from a high having just spent the last hour whizzing around a futuristic race course to a playlist of ‘techno’ while munching on tic-tacs and downing mountain dew… the game I was playing is of course the fantastic WipEout HD.

Sony and Microsoft are battling to outdo each other with their online games library and if you ignore all the fan-boy rage of ‘my online is better then yours’ both consoles offer an amazing selection of games for £5 – £20; I’ve found I spend more time playing these little gems than a lot of £30 titles.

The fact is there are only a few epic games that I actually want to play for 15+ hours to complete; I normally get bored of a game somewhere around the 8-10 hour mark (notable exceptions being Civ, MGS and GTA) and even find I don’t complete the majority of the games I purchase for full price; 20 hours into blue dragon and I was praying it would end – I never finished it. XBL and PSN games are much shorter, cheaper and I actually finish them; I also get a much wider variety of the games I am playing.

Highlights for me have been Braid, Siren, Pixel-Junk Monsters, Ratchet and Clank QFB, Super Stardust HD, Castle Crashers, WipEout HD, and old favorites such as Duke Nukem have also had a nice touchup. There seems to be no holding back with gems like fat princess on the horizon!

Don’t get me wrong, I am still willing to pay full price for upcoming titles gow2, fable2, LBP etc; games I’m sure will keep me occupied for a long time, but hopefully this flood of innovative and cheaper network games will make game devs think before putting you through 30 hours of repetitive random battles with the same damn music…. I’m looking at you Blue Dragon.

A very clever chap called Alex Popovich has got the PS3EYE working on pc. Info on doing so is on his blog here. I may pop up a screencast going throught the installation when I get a chance. If it works well for you then there is a paypal donate whatsit on his site; if you fancy giving a quid or two to support the project…

Currently loving Joe Cornish’s proposed theme song to the new Bond film Quantum of Solace.