Firmware 3.15 is now live, and with it comes the ability to play PSP Minis on your PS3. Well, as I hinted at earlier in the week, this isn’t going to just ‘work’ for every Mini – I knew not all games would work off the bat (some require a patch to work on the PS3’s Minis emulator) but I had no idea which, obviously.  However, now I’ve had chance to go through them, the list of games that do work isn’t all that impressive.

The best way to check is to go into your Download List on the PS3’s PSN Store and see what’s there – the Minis are the ones with the purple box around them. The first game I tried was Blast Off, one of my favourite Minis, and when I ran it the XMB told me that this content is exclusively for use with the PSP system, and wouldn’t run.  I then tried quirkly puzzle-platformer Kahoots.  No dice.  Echoes?  Surely that would work?

Well, at least it started.  And then crashed, on the loading screen when a PSN friend signed in.  Controller was locked up, so I had to do a hard reset to get back to the XMB and try again. Second boot – still no joy, freezes at the “loading…” prompt, so for my third attempt I tried it signed out of the PSN – ha, that worked.  So, out of three games tested, only one worked and I had to be signed out of the Network so it to actually boot up.

Looks and plays fine (with black borders) but not impressed overall.  Rumour has it that most games aren’t working at this stage, including big hitters like Tetris, so if this is a case of the developers having to patch up the games as we hinted at, Sony should really have left 3.15 for another couple of weeks until they’d actually got some Minis that work – big fan of the Minis idea and the chance to play them on my HDTV would have been welcome.

EU Minis working on PS3:

• Echoes (if not signed in to the PSN)
• Stand O’ Food

EU Minis not working on PS3:

• Blast Off
• Kahoots
• Dracula
• Circles, Circles Circles
• Pinball Fantasies
• Pinball Dreams
• Puzzle Scape Mini
• Zombie Tycoon
• Breakquest
• Tetris
• Fieldrunners
• Spot the Difference
• X Fighters
• Alien Havoc
• Bloons
• Brainpipe
• Bubble Trubble
• D-Cube Planet
• Fortix
• Hero of Sparta
• Majongg Artifacts: Chapter 2
• Sudoku
• Vempire
• YetiSports
• Yummy Yummy Cooking Jam

I’ve run out of time this morning to test any more, if anyone’s able to let us know which ones in the untested pile work and which ones don’t, I’d really appreciate it.  US owners appear to be having more luck – Kahoots works on American systems, for example, so whether this is just SCEE related or not I don’t know, but if you were looking forward to some Tetris action on your big screen tonight, you’re going to have to skip, for now at least.

It’s worth pointing out though that when the Minis do work, they really shine – Stand ‘o Food, which was a little bit unresponsive (especially on the menu) on the PSP absolutely flies along on the PS3, it’s a massive difference and it’s a great game too.  Visually you can tell the PS3’s upscaling the sprites, but it’s certainly not as ugly as you’d think.  So, please let us know which of the other Minis do and don’t work and we’ll update the list.

Let’s hope Sony work hard to get the majority working before the 17th of December.