「RISINGSUPERBLOG」

In perhaps an unusually value-centric way for me, I also wanted to take a look back at the last year of video game subscription services that I pay for and try to evaluate whether I’m getting my money’s worth on them. This is something I’ve been thinking of doing for years, but I guess now that I have this blog site, no better time than the present!

I’ve got some dollar values written below, for the sake of brevity, remember that for the rest of the article, they’re all in CAD and reflect taxed values.

I subscribe to just two video game services. Firstly, Nintendo’s full fat NSO + Expansion Pack service, which clocks in at $73.59 for one year (about $9.20 per month). They’re not exactly giving it away, but it’s not an awful price for what’s on offer.

Except… I’m happy to bait and switch you here. I’m actually in their NSO + Expansion Pack Family Membership with seven other people, which runs $114.96 per year, which is $14.37 per person. That’s about $1.20 per month. At that price, well, they really are practically giving it away! They even advertise this deal on their own site and everything. I really don’t mean for this post to be an ad, but if you have friends who are also subscribed to Nintendo’s service, I can almost guarantee that you’d save money by grouping up with them. Don’t let them take more money than they need to from you and your friend group!

Okay, so Nintendo’s a bargain! How bad could PlayStation be? I’m marked down for one subscription, no trick this time, they don’t offer family plans after all. So one year of PS+ Premium (the highest tier available) runs me about… $218.49.

Oh man. That number hurts. At least my family and I can (at time of writing) share other expensive services like Netflix and Duolingo, but man, $220 is pretty miserable no matter how you slice it! To be honest, of the two services this is the one that I’m most skeptical about the value I’m getting from it. I have absolutely no problem paying Nintendo a buck every month with how many times I randomly pop in to play Gunstar Heroes or Paper Mario, but PlayStation’s got me forking over $18 per month… Does that math work out for me?

First things first, these services offer many dozens of games per year, well over a hundred at this tier of PS+ as well. I’m obviously not playing everything, and I’m naturally sampling a lot of things for small periods of time, so I’ll stick to talking about the games I played at any real length (played many hours, or finished the game, that sort of stuff). We’ll go month by month for a nice little chronology of the year, too!

January

Nintendo opened the year hella’ strong with two classic GBA RPGs, Golden Sun, and Golden Sun: The Lost Age. I’ve started the first game many times in the past, but never managed to get as far as I got this time, around fifteen hours in. These games have absolutely wild art for such an early GBA game, leaning heavily on pre-rendered 3D models turned into sprites, and they do some amazing camera and effects work in the battle scenes that really make it look like nothing else on GBA. THough I played quite a lot, I actually randomly put it down at some point, and I can’t remember what it was! I ought to get back to this one, because I still so badly want to play the second. I’d say that’s a buck well spent on Nintendo this month.

February

February was PlayStation’s month, making up for what was a dry January for me in terms of dollar value. First up is the Toybox-developed Foamstars, which launched onto PS+. I know this isn’t really a crowd favourite, but I was looking forward to it and can confidently say I was planning to buy it, which would have cost about $46. I actually played Foamstars for almost twenty hours at the end of the day, much of it in the online coop (surprisingly fun) and solo character story modes (disappointingly repetitive despite some funny writing). The Japanese voice acting was really good and added a lot of personality, and the online matches were definitely enjoyable, but not to like, a crazy degree. Though I enjoyed it, I’m not sure I forty-six-dollars enjoyed it, so I do feel like I dodged a solid financial bullet here. Shout outs to my favourite character by a mile, Penny Gwyn, an ecowarrior raised by penguins fighting to save Earth and retore the ice caps. Click through the Foamstars images up there for a slice of the her story and the game’s sense of humour!

Resistance: Retribution (PSP) also launched this month, and I quickly hopped on that one. This game still has absolutely insane graphics for a PSP release, and the real time water in particular really impresses me for a handheld launched in 2004. The level design is extremely restrictive and the game has some structural issues to boot. Robin Atkin Downes absolutely kills it in the lead role, but the game’s dialogue is far worse than I remembered and even comes off weirdly sexist at times, so that sucks. It’s a surprisingly long game too, clocking in around the ten hour mark, which I think is a few hours too long for what’s on offer. On the cooler side of things, the new PS4/PS5 emulated version of the game lets you access various elements of the game that required you to link to a PS3 with Resistance 2 running on it. This would “infect” your copy of the game and unlock a bunch of stuff. Having access to the right stick for a more traditional third person shooting setup is cool, but as noted in the PlayStation Blog post I linked above, autoaim is disabled and the difficulty is juiced up somewhat in a way that I’m not sure I like as much as the standard level. This is just personal preference of course, but since you can’t disable the PS3 control setup, you’re kind of stuck with the difficulty being a bit higher than normal, and while the autoaim settings still exist in the options menu, they’re unfortunately completely nonfunctional. I think it’s the best version to play, but bear in mind that the PSP controls are quite different, and can arguably be experienced best on a Vita where you can map the right stick to aiming your gun anyways.

Resistance is also a weird one to categorize because I already own it, so I’m not sure I should mark down a dollar value for it. It’s cool that the new releases on the PlayStation Store honor PSP/PS1/PS2 purchases you made back on PS3 and Vita though, I’ll give them that.

April

I don’t know what exactly possessed me to 100% complete Immortals of Aveum this month, but something sure did. The allure of a shiny AAA game being given to me for “free” (a sensation that even within the context of this writeup about dollar value, I must admit has its allure) can be strong, and I guess I have my weaknesses, too! Actually though, this game was much more enjoyable than I expected. I played it many, many patches in, and the game seemed to have improved in a lot of little ways on the 1.0 version that garnered frankly mixed reviews, but I liked it. Ultimately you’re basically in for a Call of Duty-esque campaign in a magical setting (I mean this as a compliment) and it really landed for me! Some of the cutscenes were really fun, and the writing landed a joke every now and then, so I had a good time. My biggest complaint is how color coded a lot of the world and magic feels, with blue, green and red magic imbuing the world with a slightly garish gamer PC RGB lighting look that I do truly hate. I played it before the FSR 3.0 update launched as well, and more than any game it has ignited within me a strong dislike for all the modern upscaling techniques the kids are talking about these days. Give me native pixels or give me death. I almost bought a sealed copy of Immortals of Aveum for ¥2,000 at a GEO in Sugamo after an amazing meal at the fascinating restaurant Kisaburo Nojo (“Kisaburo Farm”) where you can sample eggs from chickens around Japan. These chickens were raised on specialized, restricted diets, giving the eggs unique but uniform color and flavour. I was shocked that chickens fed a diet including large amounts of yuzu peel imparted a noticeable sweet flavour to the eggs, and it’s burdened me with the assumption that chickens raised solely on Flamin’ Hot Cheetos would in fact probably produce delicious eggs. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to find out before I die, and that truly haunts me. Anyways, we’ll call that $18 for Immortals of Aveum.

May

One evening in May, I remember telling my wife that “I should make my own breakout game” She was a little stunned, but very supportive. I’d been a little depressed lately, in that sort of on-and-off kind of way I’m very susceptible to, so I think she was happy to hear I was thinking of aiming high on a project. About a week later, on a rather romantic late night walk through the Komaba Todaimae area she asked me how it was going, and I told her that I’d been working on the ball and the paddle mostly, just finessing things so it felt good. She was a bit puzzled, so I pantomimed a ball bouncing off of a brick, then the paddle, then back up. I made a little “boop” sound each time the imaginary ball bounced. “What the actual fuck are you talking about” was the response I got back. At the time I had said what I ought to be making, I was playing the excellent Game Boy game, Alleyway, made by Nintendo. It’s a really simple version of the classic block breaking experience we all know and love, only my wife hadn’t understood that when I said I should make my own breakout game, I really meant a Breakout-like video game. When I explained this to her, she was admittedly a little deflated, since she thought I had declared that I was set to put my mark on the world with a real breakout project, as in something wildly successful. I’d meant no such thing. It was pretty funny, and she was still really supportive while I worked on a Breakout-like game at the time (titled BRAINCRASHER, maybe I’ll write about it someday). Alleyway on the Game Boy is a good game, definitely worth checking out. Definitely worth paying Nintendo the buck I paid for May.

June

In June, I actually got a lot of mileage out of Nintendo stuff! First up, Capcom and Nintendo surprisingly released all five of the original Mega Man Game Boy titles. As a lifetime Mega Man hater (except Battle Network, the good one) I was dead set on getting through these games in a show of devotion to the Game Boy, which I still dearly love. I actually surprised myself and managed to finish the last boss of the first game (no save states or rewinding, either). Though I had been dead set on finishing all five games, after the first one I remembered that I don’t really like Mega Man all that much, anyhow, so I stopped. Still worth it.

Nintendo also launched the Nintendo 64 – Nintendo Switch Online: MATURE 17+ application outside of Japan this month, along with Perfect Dark. I played for around an hour or two with my wife, but the fake British accents she regularly puts on when she hears British people bordered so hard on sounding racist to British people (if that’s even a thing) that I felt compelled to stop. Perfect Dark rocks, by the way. I hope my wife never stops doing terrible accents.

Lastly, they launched two banger GBA games at once, Metroid: Zero Mission and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Four Swords. Though I hadn’t played Zero Mission since high school, I was pretty chuffed that I still managed to finish the game in about two hours! I used to speedrun that game twice a day during my fiftyish minute bus ride to and from school, and it was really gratifying to see that I still remembered a lot of it. If you’ve never played a Metroid game, Zero Mission is a great place to start since it’s A) excellent and B) a remake of the original Metroid, placing you right at the beginning of the story. Give it a go!

On the Zelda front, I actually only played The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords. When I was a kid, you used to need a GBA and a cartridge each (plus some quantity of link cables) to play this game, so I never actually got to! I think it’s legitimately really exciting that you can play multiplayer GBA games like this and Kirby & the Amazing Mirror so easily on the Switch, it’s genuinely a massive inclusion, in my opinion. Four Swords actually received an enhanced DSiWare port later on, but that was only available for a limited period of time, so it’s nice that we finally have a really accessible version of the game to play. My wife and I finished the game in two sittings, and while it’s certainly far from peak Zelda, it’s a worthwhile romp if you and a friend have an NSO subscription.

July

July opened with the surprise announcement of all three GBA Densetsu no Starfy games coming out worldwide. Good shit! I’d played the fifth one before (the only one released in English), so I was keen to see the start of the series. The games are presented in their original Japanese, so it’d be a good practice opportunity, too! Sadly, I have to report that I don’t think the first Starfy is very good. These were always designed to be all-ages friendly, but with a difficulty level lower than your average Kirby, there’s just not a lot to chew on here. Level design is interesting at a glance, owing to Starfy’s excellent underwater mobility and his fun grounded moveset, but I found that the game never really picks up. If you’re interested, I’d sooner point to the sequels, which apparently improve immediately. For what it’s worth, the level of Japanese is very easy so it could legitimately serve as a solid way to get some practice reading in!

On the PlayStation side, the Level-5 developed PSP RPG, Jeanne d’Arc was rereleased! This one has you taking control of the titular Jeanne d’Arc (Joan of Arc for you non French people) and exploring the land to save anime France. It’s a super solid tactical RPG that’s easy to get into, and as you’d expect from Level-5, it has absolutely bonkers production values. Art and sound are pristine with almost 40 minutes of anime cutscenes through its 30ish hour runtime. It’s a very easy recommendation for any of you RPG fans out there, and it looks very sharp through the higher resolution rendering of the new PS4/PS5 version. Probably my biggest gripe is that the game features a weirdly optional elemental weakness system that you’re honestly better off just never opting your characters into. It hardly powers them up to assign them a type, and you avoid the risk that comes alongside the associated weaknesses. It’s a weird element that doesn’t feel fully thought out in what is otherwise an exceptionally polished game. Like Resistance though, I already owned this one digitally on PSP (which carries forward to this PS5 version), so I don’t really know if I ought to associate a price to it. It’s not nothing, I guess, but hard to measure in dollars, you know?

August

Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team was the star of the show for me in August. Originally a dual release on GBA and DS, this game sees you become a Pokémon yourself via a short personality quiz at the outset. What follows is a bona fide hardcore Mystery Dungeon adventure, only with Pokémon, this time! For those who may not know, this is a series that began far before this title and spans many properties and aesthetics, the latest of which is the absolutely kickass Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island, which I would honestly recommend way over this game. Mystery Dungeon is largely much harder than standard Pokémon RPG titles, and this title is no exception. It offers a huge quantity of quests and recruitable Pokémon, plus the ability to venture into your friend’s randomly generated dungeons to save them after they’ve accidentally perished. Back in highschool, I had played the borderline identical DS version, Blue Rescue Team. A classmate I liked but who was in a very different social group than I had once watched me play it, and after she saw an item that looked like a bubble (top row, seventh sprite) she proceeded to nickname me Bubbles. This was a name that stuck firmly for the remaining two years of high school we had left, and to be honest, it was kind of nice. Hope she’s doing okay, wherever she is.

September

Here, we flip flop back over to another PlayStation month, and this one was a pretty big one. The Plucky Squire launched into the PS+ Extra service, and this is another game that I confidently know I would have bought, so I’ll mark down the $46 that would have run me right up front. Unlike Foamstars, where I feel I liked it and only would have overpaid if I’d bought it myself, I’m extremely glad I didn’t pay for The Plucky Squire. I did not like this game very much, and that sucks, because it really seemed dope to me.

My main complaint, was that the game is simply too slow and handhold-y. It’s not remotely difficult, and it pauses constantly to show you what to do, how to do it, and where you should do it at. There are absolute loads of cutscenes interrupting play, and though I feel very mean saying it, the writing is not the game’s forte by any means. The story is uninteresting, and the characters often don’t have much of interest to say. I didn’t really get what they were going for with some of the characters (like Moonbeard), and I felt like some of the humour fell extremely flat. There was one level dedicated to a town that was entirely composed of homages to famous artists, which, I mean, I also don’t get what that’s about. Is it supposed to be funny? Am I supposed to be impressed that the team know who all these artists are? I don’t know. I didn’t feel very impressed with that town at all, since its identity felt more busy selling us flanderized versions of famous artists than telling its own meaningful story. This feels like a very mean thing to say, so if any of the development team finds themselves here, I’m sorry for being so harsh about what probably is just intended as homage.

Additionally, though the game appears quite polished (and is indeed pretty clean on your first go through) the game was replete with progression-stopping and progress-losing bugs at release. I had to restart the game once, and fumble with the chapter select for way longer than I’d have liked as my trophy progress was botched a few times by some nasty bugs (which I believe are now fixed). I was, however, quite impressed to learn that recently they’ve released a huge patch that actually adds what they’re calling “Streamlined Mode”. This new mode apparently offers a version that dials the overwhelming storytelling and handholding back quite a bit. Having not played that mode, I don’t know how it turned out, but I applaud them hugely for taking such a difficult and broad batch of criticism and offering a reimagined way to play the game in response. That’s really impressive stuff, no matter how you slice it. I can’t say I recommend the game at all, but I do admire that they’re really working hard to get it where it needs to be. If the game interests you, at very least know that it’s in much better shape than when I played it!

On the positive side of things, PlayStation also released two of their quirky older Japanese PS2 titles (though, they only published them in Japan). These are Skygunner, and the world renowned Mister Mosquito.

I finished Skygunner in one sitting, and I gotta’ say, it’s pretty good! The anime art surprisingly still stands out as pretty unique to this day, and the world feels cool and unique. The game is one of those dope action games like Gunstar Heroes that you can dive into over and over again, owing to its fun gameplay and demanding scoring system. It offers a few different stories as well, depending on your protagonist of choice. It’s a bit of a quaint game nowadays, but having never played it, I was impressed! I’d forgotten this game was even a thing, so it was really cool to have it just drop on my plate one day like this.

Flipping over from Skygunner, we get the probably more well known Mister Mosquito. You take control of a mosquito and terrorize the Yamada household somewhere in Japan. The game features an absolutely awful English dub that you really can’t do anything about, which is a huge shame, but it truly was the style at the time. The soundtrack is surprisingly great, at least, so the audio’s not a total wreck! On the gameplay side, you fly about their extremely normal Japanese household and try to suck their blood while they’re distracted. The player is extremely vulnerable, so it’s important to time your sucks and not get too greedy, or you’ll die in a snap. There are hundreds of little collectibles around the game’s levels that you’ll use to permanently power yourself up, and even unlock a second story mode that puts some more difficult twists on the first one. The game is really creative overall, and the varied level scenarios are fun (plus the whole first story can be cleared in under two hours if you’re snappy about it, which is cool).

The inherently predatory relationship between mosquito and humans, put through the artistic lens of the game’s developers, makes for some very silly and fun sequences, but on two occasions ventures into voyeurism in a way that might ick people out. The level I regularly hear people talk about is the bath level, in which highschooler Rena Yamada is taking a bath while you do your mosquito business. I didn’t think this level was too off-putting given that she’s really just sitting there in the bath, but I get it. On the other hand, there’s another level I did find a bit much. Level 8 has Rena invite her buddy Ayaka over, and although it’s still a fun level, the scenario involves Ayaka being very lightly dressed, and the game even has her crawl around on all fours at one point (in search of her glasses). To me, much more so than the bath level, it felt like viewing Ayaka’s body was a bigger component of this level given how she’s dressed, and even putting aside that she’s 16 years old (I believe), it feels very voyeuristic in a way that even I was like yeah, this is a bit much. This level didn’t kill my enjoyment with the game, and I still think it’s a really excellent one overall, but I think it’s worth mentioning.

Between Skygunner and Mister Mosquito, neither of which I owned, but both of which I quite enjoyed, let’s call that another $27 ($13.50 each on PSN).

I have one weird one to mention here, which is September’s PS+ inclusion of Little Nightmares II. I know I said I was only going to count games I played meaningfully, but this one is a funny exception. I had just finished the first Little Nightmares with my wife (super solid lil’ platformer, btw) and was literally looking for options to buy it. I had a ¥3,300 ($30) Switch copy of the game literally in my shopping cart on an online store, and the next day they announced that the game would be added to PS+. Though I still haven’t played it yet, and you may disagree, I personally know I would have bought the game that week and I’m counting this one as a flat win.

October

Two F-Zero games, baby. That’s what October’s all about. We got F-Zero: GP Legend (F-Zero: Falcon Densetsu, or “The Legend of Falcon” in Japan) and the Japan only F-Zero Climax. These games fucking whip and I’m going to do my best to get you to play ‘em.

GP Legend’s main claim to fame is the extensive story mode, which roughly follows what happened in the anime released alongside it (the American opening is cool, too). Enter Rick Wheeler, a New York City Detective who was put on ice for 150 years by his alien nemesis, Zoda. This Demolition Man-esque story setup works, and Rick immediately jumps back into hunting down Zoda once he’s recovered. The story is fun, with eight different playable characters to follow in an order of your choosing (though you’ll need to unlock seven of them). Though the game’s story mode follows the anime, it’s heavily abridged and incomplete, so you sadly don’t get to see stuff like the absolutely banger finale (I promise you, if you’re not deep in on F-Zero lore there’s at least one dope reveal in the linked video). The game’s story occasionally rivals F-Zero GX’ infamous difficulty at times, though this time you can take advantage of the NSO application to pause and rewind if you need a well-justified helping hand in actually finishing the darn thing.

Climax, on the other hand, features no main story mode and is more of a straightforward racing game. Released about one year after GP Legend and GX/AX, Climax was the final F-Zero game released before the series’ near-20 year hiatus, which was only recently broken with 2023’s F-Zero 99. Climax overhauls many gameplay systems from GP Legend and serves as a more refined version of that game’s core racing experience. A new suite of gorgeous menus are added, along with more intricate control setups that you’ll need to engage with in order to fully embrace the new systems present in the game (such as directional side dashes). Vehicle art is also hugely enhanced, with a suite of sprites simulating the machine appearing to turn, whereas in previous sprite based F-Zero games your vehicle would be simply tilted in the appropriate direction. Though this game has been rightly criticized for reusing an absolute ton from GP Legend, it’s easily the better core racing experience and a must play for fans. It doesn’t hurt that the game is pretty rare in the wild, and regularly sells for over ¥20,000 these days (about $185) too, so it’s really cool that it’s easily available to play now. Menus feature a lot of English, though plenty of text is unlocalized and remains in Japanese, so be brave!

Also released by Nintendo this month was the Nintendo Music application for phones. I don’t have a ton to say about this, but it’s really funny that they launched with a few dozen game OSTs and now they’re drip-feeding one per week. It’ll take literally decades to get through their whole library, and I’m here for it. Last week I mainly listened to the music from Brain Age and it made me feel happy, so I’d call this app a win. It has a few neat features like being able to extend certain tracks to loop cleanly for up to an hour, but it’s otherwise kind of no-frills. Still a fun addition.

Lastly, October features the PS2 masterpiece, Siren, which I had never played before. In case you missed it, I wrote up a lengthy article on it recently, in which you’ll see just how much I fucking loved this game. Seriously, this game absolutely kicks ass, and it’s one of my all time horror favourites now. Go read the article if you want more, I already wrote enough the first time! Though it feels at odds with praising its tremendous artistry, let’s mark down another $13.50 for PlayStation.

November

I only played one PS+ game for a meaningful amount of time this month, Tango Gamework’s Ghostwire: Tokyo (RIP). I already own the disc for it, but it was trapped in my last PS5 that sadly stopped working and is now living in Canada, waiting for me to eventually return and get it repaired. I’d been wanting to play the game’s roguelike DLC, The Spider’s Thread, for a while, but sadly I was unable to. Enter PS+, providing me with the means to log over 10 hours into the DLC before realizing that you know what, I’m good actually. I don’t like roguelikes all that much anyhow. It was a pretty fun game mode though, no shade on the developers whatsoever! Just don’t have the interest in playing for what seems like another ten hours to see it through. Because of the unusual circumstances, I don’t think I can really put a dollar amount on this one either. My disc is just in purgatory for now, after all.

Now, ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron, now that’s a fucking game. If you’ve never been afforded the pleasure of playing this one, you really ought to. Take a minute to look up the intricate controls on GameFAQs and hop into what is legit one of the funkiest and most interesting platformers on the Genesis (with a friend, if you can). It’s mechanically and artistically creative, and in many ways feels quite ahead of its time. Where Treasure developed Genesis platformer classics to mechanical and gamefeel perfection in the edge-of-your-seat action category, Panic on Funkotron goes the opposite direction in a similarly strong and well excecuted way. It’s a laid back (potentially co-op) romp that you’ll equally never forget. I’ve never finished this game and I’m not sure I ever will, but it’s always a fun one to return to. The first game is also cool, but really a totally separate thing, so don’t feel the need to catch up on that one first.

December

Not much to note here! I became very busy with Holiday stuff and family coming to visit, so I played fewer games. Despite Alien: Fireteam Elite coming to PS+ and looking rad as hell, I never did get around to playing it. Similarly, all Nintendo added was Tetris and Tetris DX (NES and Game Boy Color, respectively) which honestly do nothing for me. I respect the hell out of NES Tetris and find its competitive scene fascinating, but I don’t really enjoy playing it as opposed to more modern titles like Terror Instinct, Tetris DS, or Tetris Effect. I have even less interest in Tetris DX, which is more or less just a gussied up Game Boy Tetris With a worse soundtrack. Probably legitimately my least favourite NSO month of the year.

All in all, where does that leave us? Well, in terms of dollars, for Nintendo I absolutely don’t give a care. At $1.20 a month I feel I’ve gotten way more than my money’s worth in just the games I’ve listed here, let alone the dozens I sample through the year. Easy win for Nintendo, and even if I were paying the regular price (about $9 per month), I don’t think it would be too awful. Like I said at the beginning though, get yourself in a family plan. Shit’s unbelievably cheap.

For PlayStation… yeah… not as good. $218 per year, and I valued the games I played thoroughly (at the prices I would have paid) at about $150. $180 if I include that copy of Little Nightmares II they saved me on. For those who aren’t great at math, that’s a $38 deficit. So outside of the games whose value I can quantify cleanly, what am I getting?

When it comes to games like Resistance: Retribution, Jeanne D’Arc, and Ghostwire where I already own them in some other way, I do still think I’m getting some tangible benefit for my money. With Ghostwire, I mean, losing the disc temporarily was a freak accident, but for the classic games it is nice to have them on a current console. There are also many games like Dino Crisis, Tunic, Ghostrunner 2, Humanity, and Dead Island 2 that I’ve only just sampled but I intend to play when I have time. I also buy way too many games in general, and I know I take advantage of a lot of PS+ exclusive discounts they offer, but I don’t think I ought to count those because they’re just tricking me into spending more, you know?

I have been using their game streaming stuff lately while my wife is using the TV, though I also have a hard time quantifying that with a dollar value. All in all, if it’s only about a $38 dollar gap, I feel it’s fair to say that I came pretty close on this one. I’ll be sticking around on this sub for at least one more year yet, but I’ll be curious to reevaluate this next December!

Thank you to writers and volunteers on the following sites for gathering all the information I was dreading having to gather myself;

Wikipedia – List of Nintendo Switch Online Games
GameRant – PS Plus: A Comprehensive List Of Every Monthly Game It’s Added

Some images have been provided by publishers (in cases where reinstalling the game would just be too much of a hassle :P).