PS+: Best 5000 Yen Ever

Back in December my wife gifted me a PS4 for my birthday and since then I've been a member of Playstation plus.  Aside from Tekken 6, I never played my PS3 online too much and Xbox Gold pissed me off by being a pay to play service for online games but I decided to jump back into these kind of online services for consoles and see whats up and now I'm pleasantly surprised.

The draw of the PS3 over the 360 back when those consoles were all the rage was that you didn't need to pay for the PS3s online service to play your games online.  Xbox on the other hand required that you had Xbox Live Gold which where you would pay monthly to get shouted at down a microphone by 12 year old children who think they are really cool playing Call of Duty and Gears of War. You'd still have the 12 year olds on PSN but at least you didn't have to pay for that shitty experience.

Of course, times have changed and now, as far as I understand, you are required to be paying for PS+ in order to play your games online.  It's not that expensive, I dropped just over 5000 yen for a year long subscription which is equivalent to about £30.  Now I don't really have any games that are required to be played online but I'm still really happy with my decision because PS+ just goes and throws 2 free games at you every month.

Now I caught wind of the free games that were available on the UK PS+ service and I get the feeling that if I was living in England this post would have a very different tone.  This month the UK PS+ users got Zombi and some space thing I've never heard of while I got Earth Wars, a cool side scrolling hack and slash with slightly dodgy character animation and Skulls of The Shogun, a cool little indie TBS that's both challenging and charming.

Generally speaking, the free games spat out by PS+ have been pretty good.  Most notably I've had Metal Slug 3, Steins Gate and Toukiden Kiwami just thrown at me for no money.  The total value of all the games I've downloaded easily exceeds 20,000 yen  and it's only April.  By the time I have to renew my shit PS+ would have paid for itself purely in free shit. 

Paying to play online feels like bullshit when I can do it for no real extra cost on my PC but at least with Playstation I'm being showered with free shit.  Granted they put some crap games on there too but generally speaking I'm happier with the PS+ service than any other online gaming service that I've paid for in the past.