I’ve been subscribing to Playstation Plus for the last few years, and I’ve been pretty happy with the service so far — the amount of free games and discounts I’ve received has greatly outweighed the cost of a subscription. The American version of the service is pretty great, but apparently the Japanese PS+ is even better: Sony announced today that they’re adding over one hundred PS1 games to Japanese PS+’s “free” Instant Game Collection.
Admittedly, a lot of the 123 games added to the Instant Game Collection aren’t very good — there’s a lot of budget shovelware and old visual novels — but there’s some genuinely great games mixed in there too, such as the legendary shmup Thunder Force V (sure, it’s the PS1 port and not the superior Saturn version, but it’s hard to complain when it’s free,) some of the PS1 Shin Megami Tensei games, the first few Armored Core games, a couple Bomberman games, and a few of the sequels from the Langrisser series. Not bad for a freebie.
You can view the full line-up for Sony’s “123” promotion here.
Currently, this buffet of free (-ish) PS1 games is only available to Japanese gamers, but hopefully SCEA will offer a similar promotion over here.
