As I said I would on the podcast, I purchased a one year subscription to PlayStation Network’s new premium pay-us service PlayStation Plus. It was perhaps only an hour or so since it was posted on the PlayStation Store that I excitedly download firmware 3.40, scratched some unknown gray stuff off some PSN cards, typed in some codes, and bought my way into PS Store Shopper: Elite status.

Cosmetic Changes. Mmmmm…

First of all, PS+ gives you all of these little golden D-Pad icons sprinkled about your XMB. There’s one in the status bar next to your PSN avatar. There’s one next to your own listing in the friends list, and there’s one next to your avatar in your profile. In addition, golden D-Pads show up next to each of your friends who have also purchased PS+. I imagine people who haven’t subscribed will also see these Shopper: Elite badges as well, but since I jumped on the wagon so early, I can’t say that I’ve seen it myself.

Golden D-pads also show up next to each item in the PlayStation Store that has a PS+ special promotion associated with it. It’s a nice way to quickly see what’s on sale.

Discounts and Free Games

About Shopper: Elite status, I think of PS+ in this way because that is essentially what it is. The meat of the program is the discounts and freebies PlayStation offers each month to PS+ members. This month’s free games are WipEoutHD (PS3), Age of Zombies (minis), and Rally Cross(PSOne Classics), the first of which I already have, leaving me with Age of Zombies and Rally Cross as the only immediate payoffs for my PS+ enthusiasm. I did get two Fat Princess avatars and a pretty nice looking XMB theme for free too, but even so, this was a bit of a letdown.

On the discount side, there are many offerings ranging from 50% off old Midway games to 20% Tiki and Creat’s lineup of PSN exclusives (plus free access to all the DLC packs for those games) to $1.00 off the new DLC expansion pack for Fat Princess. Not to rag on Mortal Kombat II, but I don’t want any of the old Midway games. The Tiki/Creat games Magic Orbz and Wakeboarding HD might get my money in the future, but they are very low priority.

So far, that means my savings from PS+ equal $1.00.

The Future Looks Promising?

While all of this may seem slightly negative so far, I’m still excited for PlayStation Plus’s future. inFAMOUS being offered up as a downloadable game with a PS+ exclusive one hour timed demo of the full game shows some interesting future potential for trying before buying on PSN. I’m interested to see if I can load my disc copy of inFAMOUS saved games with the timed demo to see if it’ll let me play an hour from a point further along in the story. I’ll have to clear some space before I can try this.

Speaking of drive space, I checked out the auto download feature for PS+ overnight, and in the morning, I was notified by my system, at startup, that Fat Princess 2.0 had been downloaded while I slept. At first I was worried that auto download was going to be filling my already bursting at the seams harddrive up with video and demos I had already seen and played, so having the PS3 automatically update Fat Princess, without me having to continuously launch the game to see if the patch had come out yet (which I have been doing) was pretty nice. I can see auto download being extremely convenient for when the barrage of patches come to the next COD game to fight off the hackers.

Recommendations? Parting Thoughts?

It occurred to me today, as I wait for the PlayStation Store to update, that I won’t know what to buy off of PSN from now on. One of this month’s free PSN games was WipEoutHD, a game I already spent $20 on. I don’t want to spend money on a game this week only to have it be a free PlayStation Plus game next week, but since PlayStation isn’t likely to be completely forthcoming with what’s on offer for PS+ in the months ahead I may not have a choice if I want to continue to play the “latest and greatest.”

On the flip side, what if all of the future free games are games I already have right now, ie. older games? That would help me avoid spending money today and in the weeks ahead on new games that are soon to be PS+ free games, but then all of the PS+ games are old games which wouldn’t be a very impressive mark for the service.

I guess there will always be free episodes of Qore, mystery betas and demos to look forward to.

A note on the “free” games: It would appear that the free games that come with PS+ each have expiration dates on them that coincide with the end of your subscription period. If you renew, and the PS+ subscription comes with automatic renewals, the expiration dates probably just change to reflect another term. If you chose to cancel, the games simply stop working unless you purchase them. There don’t appear to be any restrictions on getting trophies or anything like that on the free games, so this might also be a really good deal for Trophy whores as well.