By Leo Stiles
One of Sony’s big announcements at the E3 gaming conference in Los Angeles last month was its plans to introduce a premium version of its Playstation Network (PSN) service called Playstation Plus.
The service which launched on June 24 is subscription based and for your hard-earned cash you get one full PSN title per month along with two PS Mini games and a PSOne Classic. In addition to this, membership gives you early access to demos, discounts on popular content and access to the automatic download feature that will ensure everything on your Playstation 3 is up to date, all without you having to lift a finger.
Playstation Plus comes in two varieties: a 90 day subscription for €14.99 and a 12 month subscription for €49.99. Any free content downloaded during your membership period is only available for the duration of your subscription and will be unavailable after your time is up unless you renew your subscription.
So is this service for you, or is it another cash grab from the boys at Sony? We took the plunge a couple of weeks ago and have since found out that Playstation Plus is a case of the good, the bad and the very ugly.
The Good:
Little Big Planet (Free)
The big carrot for stumping up the cash for the 12 month subscription is the inclusion of a free copy of Little Big Planet. Easily one of the reasons to own a PS3, Little Big Planet is a brilliantly original game that hides deep and complex game creation tools under the disguise of a platformer with the ever appealing Sackboy characters.
The game, a modest success in 2008, has thrived over the last two years and has a wealth of user-generated content that ranges from absurdly amateur to shockingly professional and provided an almost unlimited stream of content long after the main game has been beaten.
Given that this game will cost €20 used and €29.99 new, Little Big Planet represents real value if accessed through Playstation Plus but only if you overlooked it when it was first released.
WipEout HD (Free)
This game is one of the hidden gems on the PSN; a blisteringly fast racer that distills the best elements of previous WipEout games and creates the definitive title in the series. Running on a 1080p HDTV the game is utterly stunning, featuring the highest definition visuals running at a frame rate of 60 frames per second. If you ever wanted proof that the PS3 was the most powerful console money can buy, WipEout HD is it.
The game usually costs €17.99 on PSN and is a great game to make you feel like the price of your subscription is worthwhile. Not included is the add-on Fury Pack which adds a wealth of content to the game and costs €9.99.
The Bad:
PS Minis x2 (Free)
After the greatness of the first two freebies, we were about to give the whole thing a big thumbs up, but Sony’s next offering was nearly enough to make us poke our eyeballs out instead.
Clearly more suited to being played on the PSP rather than the PS3, the PS Minis are small and simple slices of gameplay that offer a mere diversion from your main gaming diet.
The first title we got to have a go at is Field Runners, a quite playable tower defence game that found fame on the iPhone, before being ported to the Playstation. The idea behind the game is that you have to stop ever more dangerous waves of troops from entering your fort. To stop them you have various guns and gadgets which you can place on the field to halt the advance.
The second Mini, Burn Zombie Burn, is a twin-stick shooter in the mould of Geometry Wars or Super Stardust HD and is laughably poor. While the basic graphics might get a pass on the small PSP screen; blown up on a 42″ screen, they become a mess with pixels smeared across the screen in a mass of green and red. Gameplay on the big screen suffers too with the idiotic decision by the designers not to make use of Sixaxis’ analogue sticks. Instead you have to use the face buttons, which make the game all but unplayable.
Both games would cost you €2.99 outside of Playstation Plus.
The Ugly:
PSOne Classic: Destruction Derby (Free)
We definitely had to take off our rose tinted glasses for the next item, the PSOne Classic Destruction Derby. When this game was released in 1995, its gameplay shortcomings were masked by its at-the-time state-of-the-art-graphics and destructible car models. Today, and displayed on a full HD telly, there is no escaping its flaws with chiefly lie with its graphics and repetitive racing.
Again this sort of thing is better suited to the PSP where many of the graphical shortcomings can be ignored. On your cutting edge console it’s totally out of place.
Destruction Derby costs €4.99 outside of Playstation Plus
The Rest:
Of the remaining content, only the Killzone 2 expansion packs really stand out and offer a decent excuse to dust off the game and give it another go, but it is still as flawed as it ever was, so our reunion was brief.
Elsewhere there are some themes and avatar icons for free but this kind of stuff should never carry a price tag in the first place.
Much like Xbox Live’s weekly specials to Gold members, Playstation Plus comes with discounts on selected content such as add-on packs and older PSN games. If you go for any of this then your value for money should shoot up.
Lastly, there are two full PSN game trials which afford you some play time with some brand new titles before you dig out your wallet. That this applies to selected titles only is a complete mystery to us as Xbox Live Arcade titles have offered trials on every game from the start with no need to be a subscriber. Sony are surely missing an opportunity to offer Playstation Plus users something practical and a genuine reason to subscribe.
Extra features:
One of the more curious features is the Auto Download setting a Playstation Plus subscription unlocks on your console. This feature allows you to set a time for the PS3 to download game and system updates along with new demos and content, even when the system is turned off.
Automatic firmware updates are just fine, as are any game patches but for new content such as demos, you are at the mercy of Sony and during the two weeks that we were using the service all we got from Sony was a Heavy Rain demo. This was useless, particularly since we had downloaded the demo before and played through the full game earlier this year.
This feature could do with more work and should allow you to specify what kind of content you wish to download so that you can be sure that you don’t end up downloading something you’ve downloaded before. Â After all, some of us have download caps from our ISPs and this feature could easily waste 5 gigs or more with pointless downloads.
Our Verdict:
There is no doubt about it, over the course of 12 months a subscription to Playstation Plus will repay itself quickly in purely monetary terms. But whether this can be viewed as good value remains to be seen with future updates missing the sweetener that is Little Big Planet.
Sony have a good track record of producing quality downloadable games on the PSN, so it’s not like they don’t have the content. Titles like Warhawk are prime examples of this. PS Minis should just be scrapped altogether and a Final Fantasy quality title will have to be offered if we are going to want to bother downloading another PSOne Classic game.
While we are cautiously optimistic about what Sony will offer those who take the plunge, any serious lapse in content quality will swiftly earn a cancellation from many users and if all you want from the PSN is access to multiplayer then there is no reason to spend your money here.
Anyone who hasn’t experienced the excellence of Little Big Planet and WipEout HD should do themselves a favour and opt for the 12 month package and trust in Sony to deliver a couple of other quality downloads over the next year which will more than repay the initial investment.
Check back with JOE next month when we will update you with the latest offers from Playstation Plus and let you know if is Sony is delivering on their promise.
LISTEN: You Must Be Jokin’ podcast – listen to the latest episode now!
