e wrapped up our week on the road with a stop in Los Angeles to see a slice of Sony’s lineup. Even though one quarter of the games on display were of the “walk around and kill a bunch of dudes” variety, the overall lineup was impressively diverse. Heck, even the shooters were different enough to satisfy a number of different audiences—from the tactical-sim geeks to the arcade-oriented action fans. And say what you will about Sony, it’s definitely a company that’s not afraid to nurture smaller boutique-style games in addition to its hardcore audience. Here are our impressions of everything we got our hands on:

Buzz! PS3
The biggest thing that players will notice when they get their hands on Buzz! on the PlayStation 3 is the fact that they’re no longer tethered to their consoles. That’s right—it now includes wireless controllers. The controllers look virtually identical to their PS2 counterparts, though they’re a bit heavier due to the pair of AA batteries that provide juice to each one. After plugging a dongle into one of the PS3’s USB ports, you’re ready to go.

Another big change to Buzz! is the addition of user-created online quizzes. If you think you can do better than the quizmasters at Sony, you can create your own questions and challenge the greater community online. Users can browse those quizzes by specific creator and popularity, too, so they won’t be downloading completely blind. After completing one of those quizzes, you’re given the opportunity to rate it, which affects its overall ranking online. If you run into objectionable or inaccurate content, you can flag those quizzes, too. It sounds like a solid check-and-balance system to ensure a modicum of quality for those quizzes. Quizmasters can also flag their quizzes to be public or private, allowing users to make a special personalized one for people celebrating a birthday party, for example.

Online isn’t limited to mere downloading of quizzes, either. Players can join up in groups of four players online, whether they’re playing solo and looking for a quick game or are playing with two others at home and are looking for another contestant to make it an even foursome.

The game retains its sense of humor and quirky style in its move to PS3 hardware, it just so happens to look even sharper. The 11 available contestants look great and have a variety of different animations, whether they’re celebrating a correct answer or hanging their heads in shame after screwing up.

Buzz! is a great pick for a party game, with accessible gameplay that doesn’t rely on a bunch of gimmicky minigames. While modes might have players tossing pies at their rivals after answering correctly or tossing bombs back and forth like hot potatoes, it’s a quiz game through and through. That’s something that even nongamers should be able to get behind.

Buzz! PSP
On the portable front, Buzz! PSP gives handheld users a similar experience to their console counterparts, even though it’s on the small screen. Don’t expect a straight port of previous games though—it’s been designed specifically for Sony’s handheld.

Featuring about 3,000 of its own questions—with about a third of those featuring multimedia content—players should have plenty to keep them busy on the road. While it can be played alone, up to six can compete competitively via its passaround mode. After selecting a character, the game picks the turn order randomly. When prompted, players pass the PSP to the designated user.

Some of the challenges we saw in passaround included Virus, in which an infected player loses points depending upon how long it takes them to answer correctly. Once they do, they can pass the virus to a competitor. Picture This starts with one player examining a picture and figuring out which quarter of that image they’d like to show their opponent. Based on that part of the image, the other player has to answer a question about that picture. For example, we started with a picture of the singer Pink, and chose the quadrant of her picture that included one of her eyes. Our rival had to figure out what video she was featured in, with the correct answer being “Lady Marmalade.”

The game looks quite good, and it includes the same addicting (and infuriating) gameplay of its big brother. Keep an eye out for Buzz! if you have a lot of quiz-minded buddies.

Linger-In Shadows
Don’t think of Linger-In Shadows as a game. It’s more along the lines of interactive art. After watching the demo, we were impressed with what we saw, even though it’s hard to pinpoint what exactly that was.

Everything in Linger-In Shadows is rendered in realtime, though it doesn’t appear to be completely interactive—at least from the standpoint we’re all familiar with. As a camera floats past odd, cute and bizarre landscapes, users can pause the action, manipulate certain nodes and change their path. One segment featured a beagle swimming through the sky, only to get engulfed by a strange black cloud. As a cat stopped cleaning itself to watch, the dog turned to stone and shattered to pieces.

Senior Producer Rusty Buchert said that, while themes will present themselves upon multiple viewing, much of what’s shown is subject to viewer interpretation. The work is the product of a vibrant demoscene, in which programmers, artists and others toil to squeeze every drop of power out of a particular piece of machinery. They’ve had plenty to work with on the PS3, and it shows.

Linger-In Shadows is set to be a PSN release, though pricing and the release schedule isn’t being publically discussed at this point.

MotorStorm 2: Pacific Rift
MotorStorm’s bullet-point list of features is enough to make a MotorStorm fan want to do a little impromptu dance. You get 16 tracks, four-way split-screen multiplayer, levels with water, the ability to create your own tickets and much more. Basically, even at its current 40-percent complete state, it looks like it’s going to be addressing many of the complaints from the first game while adding a whole bunch of unexpected (but welcome) twists.

Players can now actively bash their opponents off track or into harm’s way by pressing the square button. Water and lava cover certain parts of the track, creating opportunities to quickly cool down your boost meter or accidently increase it, respectively. There are also road-dominating monster trucks, which can bully their way into position or knock smaller opponents out of the race temporarily. Of course, this being MotorStorm, the little guys are quick and nimble enough to zip past and find safer (or riskier) alternate routes if a path gets too clogged.

We played through a few levels, and though we still could use some more time behind the wheel, we got the hang of it in short order. Tracks are as crazy as before, though they seem to incorporate more blind jumps and stomach-churning turns than ever. The tracks themselves took place on a tropical island, with bunkers (some seemingly abandoned, others with still-functioning turrets), black sand and plenty of car-stopping foliage. We had a tendency to get caught up on the terrain, though that was probably due in large part to our inexperience with these new tracks.

The game looks quite good, though it doesn’t seem to have that same wow factor as the first game did at its release. The producers are doing their best to fix those little annoyances in the first game, like extended loading screens and hitches when selecting cars, though. That’s great news for anyone who’s looking forward to just diving in and wrecking a bunch of bikers on a huge truck.