Why I love PS Plus
Mar. 31st, 2014 01:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yendiI've mentioned my love for the Playstation Plus service before. I want to talk a little more about it. Basically, if you have a PS3, you should get it.
The way the service works is this: You pay $50 for a year's membership. During that time (and you can renew, etc), you can "buy" any game offered as for free by the service. Once you "buy" it, you can download it again at any time as long as your membership's active (because your hard drive fills up quickly). Yes, it's effectively a rental service, but it's got some damned nice terms. You also get pretty steep discounts on games to legitimately buy every week, as well as cloud saves for games, downloadable game trials, and a few other things.
So one of the games I've been playing has been DMC: Devil May Cry. I loved the first two levels of this game, which were filled with action-game goodness, lots of slashing and shooting with reasonably intuitive controls, and some fun over-the-top writing and cutscenes (the opening movie, featuring a naked Dante leaping into his clothes, was just my kind of ridiculous). Then I hit a platforming section in Stage 3 that was impossible for me. It basically involves chaining two different moves together in a way that my fingers simply say, "oh, fuck that" to. It's a manual dexterity thing I just can't manage, and isn't the slightest bit about gameplay.
If I'd paid $60 for that game, I'd have been pissed. Hell, if I'd paid the discounted price of $30 or so, I'd have been annoyed. But it was there for me to take, I got an hour of good gaming out of it, and if I never make it further in the game, at least I could try it and have some fun.
And I've played a lot more games that would have been worth full price. I worked my way through the Vita version of Disgaea 3 for free, has a blast on Infamous 2, have sunk many hours into Poker Night at the Inventory, etc.
To get a sense of the games that I've got, here's the full list of games PS+ has made available.Yeah, I've got two Bioshock games, the new Tomb Raider, Kingdoms of Amalur, Shadow of the Colossus, Saints Row the Third, Deus Ex, Uncharted, XCOM, Demon's Souls, Sleeping Dogs (which came with ALL the DLC), Metro: Last Light and more. Plus a ton of indy games, some of which have been the best stuff I've played (Brothers, The Cave, Labyrinth Legends, Quantum Conundrum). And Batman: Arkham City hits tomorrow.
Yeah, it means waiting anywhere from ten months (BioShock Infinite, Hitman, Amalur) to a couple of years (Batman*), but as someone with limited resources on both the financial and time front, I'm okay with that. I basically buy 1-2 games a year other must-have games a year (generally LEGO and Disgaea ones), and I've got enough games to keep me entertained for a long, long time.
And that's just on my PS3. The Vita selection is also damned solid (especially in the last year), and there's a small library growing for the PS4 (mostly indies, but once a few more months pass, I suspect that it'll grow like the Vita one did).
*Of course, folks in Europe got this game ages ago, along with Mass Effect 3. Different regions have different deals.
The way the service works is this: You pay $50 for a year's membership. During that time (and you can renew, etc), you can "buy" any game offered as for free by the service. Once you "buy" it, you can download it again at any time as long as your membership's active (because your hard drive fills up quickly). Yes, it's effectively a rental service, but it's got some damned nice terms. You also get pretty steep discounts on games to legitimately buy every week, as well as cloud saves for games, downloadable game trials, and a few other things.
So one of the games I've been playing has been DMC: Devil May Cry. I loved the first two levels of this game, which were filled with action-game goodness, lots of slashing and shooting with reasonably intuitive controls, and some fun over-the-top writing and cutscenes (the opening movie, featuring a naked Dante leaping into his clothes, was just my kind of ridiculous). Then I hit a platforming section in Stage 3 that was impossible for me. It basically involves chaining two different moves together in a way that my fingers simply say, "oh, fuck that" to. It's a manual dexterity thing I just can't manage, and isn't the slightest bit about gameplay.
If I'd paid $60 for that game, I'd have been pissed. Hell, if I'd paid the discounted price of $30 or so, I'd have been annoyed. But it was there for me to take, I got an hour of good gaming out of it, and if I never make it further in the game, at least I could try it and have some fun.
And I've played a lot more games that would have been worth full price. I worked my way through the Vita version of Disgaea 3 for free, has a blast on Infamous 2, have sunk many hours into Poker Night at the Inventory, etc.
To get a sense of the games that I've got, here's the full list of games PS+ has made available.Yeah, I've got two Bioshock games, the new Tomb Raider, Kingdoms of Amalur, Shadow of the Colossus, Saints Row the Third, Deus Ex, Uncharted, XCOM, Demon's Souls, Sleeping Dogs (which came with ALL the DLC), Metro: Last Light and more. Plus a ton of indy games, some of which have been the best stuff I've played (Brothers, The Cave, Labyrinth Legends, Quantum Conundrum). And Batman: Arkham City hits tomorrow.
Yeah, it means waiting anywhere from ten months (BioShock Infinite, Hitman, Amalur) to a couple of years (Batman*), but as someone with limited resources on both the financial and time front, I'm okay with that. I basically buy 1-2 games a year other must-have games a year (generally LEGO and Disgaea ones), and I've got enough games to keep me entertained for a long, long time.
And that's just on my PS3. The Vita selection is also damned solid (especially in the last year), and there's a small library growing for the PS4 (mostly indies, but once a few more months pass, I suspect that it'll grow like the Vita one did).
*Of course, folks in Europe got this game ages ago, along with Mass Effect 3. Different regions have different deals.