If you have a PS3 then these are the gadgets you should look at buying to get the most from your machine.
Official Sony Blu-ray Remote for PS3 - £15While the PS3 might be trailing the Xbox 360 in the sales wars, it has got one thing over it for sure: it's a much, much lovelier media centre. It's a better-looking piece of hardware (its massive size aside), it's near-silent when not running a game, it's blessed with some of the finest SD to HD upscaling there is and of course there's that Blu-Ray drive.
No need for a separate DVD drive or a media centre PC when you've got one of these. You will need a remote though, and Sony's official effort is the best one around.
Large and robust with an absolute wealth of buttons, you wouldn't guess it was designed for a console rather than a dedicated piece of AV kit. Best of all, it's Bluetooth - which means line of sight to the console isn't required.
So hide the PS3 away in a cupboard and keep your guests guessing. Oh - and don't be fooled by the name. The remote works with any media file or disc the console can play.
PS3 KeyboardYep, any old keyboard - just as long as it's USB rather than olde worlde PS/2.
The PS3's web browser ain't half bad, but hopping around the internet with a game pad is a bit like juggling with your feet.
What's not entirely well known is that you can plug in a keyboard and then use the browser as you would one on a PC. You can also navigate around the PS3's interface with the cursor keys if you so desire.
If you're feeling really fruity, PS3-specific Bluetooth models are available - they're pricey, but they match the console and they're wireless. Logitech have an especially nice one.
Extra PS3 hard drive - £33Unlike the 360's irksome and expensive proprietary jobbies, you can swap the PS3's built-in hard drive for a standard laptop drive.
120Gb and upwards models go for as little as around £30 these days, so you can have yourself a console that can store a metric crapton of movies and PSN downloads very cheaply.
Very easily too - it's a 20 minute job that just requires a bit of screwdriver work, and the console itself will walk you through formatting the drive once it's in.
The guide here will sort you out. Just be sure you get the right drive in the first place - it needs to be 2.5-inch in size, and with a SATA (not IDE) connection.
HDMI (male) to DVI (female) adapter - Around £4If the family is using the telly in the lounge you're left in the gaming cold. Unless you lug the PS3 off to your bedroom or study and connect it to your PC's monitor... only to find it doesn't have the outputs.
You can buy cheap VGA cables for the 360, but matters are a little more complicated for the PS3, which doesn't natively support it.
There's an easier, and even cheaper way to plug it into a monitor though - an adapter that converts the PS3's standard HD connection, HDMI, into the DVI standard. HDMI is just a smaller version of DVI with an added audio signal, y'see.
So grab one of these from eBay or a hardware store such as Maplin, plug it into the PS3's HDMI output, then just connect the monitor's HDMI cable to it
PS2 Memory Card Adapter - £8.50Only of use if you've got one of the earlier, non-crippled PS3s with full Playstation 2 backwards compatibility support, but this is pretty much a must-have if you do.
With it, you can transfer all your old PS2 saves and whatnot onto the PS3's hard drive - so you won't have to lose that GTA Vice City 100 per cent completion save after all. You can also pick up a similar thing for PS1 memory cards.
Gioteck RealTriggers - £3.50The Playstation gamepad remains a design classic, but action games' more or less standardised use of the main shoulder buttons means it's a little lacking.
The PS3 controller's 'triggers' are near flat, making it sometimes tricky to keep a full grip on 'em. These plug-on doodads transform the buttons into something agreeably chunkier - so you get both a more secure fit and something that feels a little more like pulling a gun trigger.
Sony Dualshock 3 - £30Graah - famously, the PS3's Sixaxis controller lacked any of the vibration/rumble goodness that we've come to expect over the last couple of console generations. Realising they'd made a boo-boo, Sony finally caved and came up with this new pad.
It's annoying you have to fork out separately, and that only more recent games support it, but if you're in the market for a second controller, look no further than this classically designed beauty.
Hori Arcade Fighting Stick - £38We featured the 360 version of this in our round-up of 10 essential peripherals for Microsoft's console, but it's also available on PS3.
As this was the first console home of Virtua Fighter 5, has Tekken Dark Resurrection on PSN and Street Fighter IV inbound, a good fighting stick is perhaps even more of necessity than it is for the 360.
A chunky stick and big, thumpable buttons give you the arcade edge you'll need in any fighting game.
There are two versions of the fighting stick - a straight, svelte one, and one plastered with Soul Calibur V artwork. The latter's the more garish, but can usually be found a bit cheaper.
Splitfish FragFX Wired Controller - £40And if you want a similar edge in first-person shooters, look no further than this bizarre hunk of plastic.
It's a gamepad/mouse hybrid that emulates the rodent 'n' keyboard experience that habitual PC gamers require to excel at FPSes.
Technically, it could be considered cheating, but so far as the console knows you're just using a standard Sixaxis pad.
Your lefthand uses a standard thumbstick to move and strafe, and the right moves a customised mouse around to control your targeting.
The mouse even has the beloved Playstation facebuttons built into the side.
ShootpadBig Ben Shootpad - £49This is either the football equivalent of those driving range-simulating toys that high-powered executives buy, or the worst idea in the world. It's possibly both.
As well as a one-handed control, this piece of peculiar madness includes an elasticised mini-football affixed to a special mat - the idea being that you actually kick the ball in PES, FIFA or whatever, rather than simply push a button.
Just like real football, but not. Surely it can only go horribly wrong - but don't deny that you desperately want to give it a go.
Play TV - £60That cheeky PS3 - it's totally a PC in disguise as a games console.
There's no stronger proof than this TV tuner add-on, which turns the cumbersome darling into a fully-functional Freeview box, further cementing its status as a media centre par excellence.
Not only that, but it can record shows and do the pausing live TV thing - and it can stream any of it over to your PSP.
You too can live the watching Eastenders on the beach dream. Though we do recommend having better dreams, frankly.
Bluetooth wireless headset - £9There's voicecomms support in most online PS3 games, but Sony doesn't provide a headset along with the console, annoyingly.
Fortunately, it supports many standard Bluetooth earpieces, so if you've got one for your mobile phone you may find it plays nice with the console too.
Alternatively, you can pick one up for less than a tenner - don't worry about it being an official Sony model or not, just as long as it says it does work with the PS3.
A third option is to pick up the not-bad online shooter Warhawk, which has a headset stuffed into the box.
A new update for the PlayStation 3 has added full-screen support for Adobe's Flash Player.The update also offers improved support for all Flash-based content within the console's browser.
for those UK PlayStation gamers that were unable to access iPlayer on the multiple other platforms it's already been made available on.
