The Xbox’s free game collection, Games With Gold, is finally catching on to the notion that more is better. In an obvious response to the changing plans of the PlayStation Plus Instant Game Collection, Microsoft has upped the number of games to five as it takes its free offerings into the next generation on the Xbox One.
The obvious king of the bunch is the Xbox 360 version of Dark Souls, one of the biggest surprise hits and influential games of the previous generation. Seriously, it’s difficult to find any indie or Japanese studio who doesn’t cite this game as one of their biggest inspirations. It’s a perfect sequel and one of the best games of the last half a decade. Pick it up if you are one of the few who hasn’t yet.
It’s available June 1st until June 15th.
The Xbox One selection of games isn’t up to snuff just yet, but they are there if you want them. Max: The Curse of Brotherhood and Halo: Spartan Assault will both be available for free this month, not that anybody was really asking them to be. Max: The Curse of Brotherhood was just released on Steam, where it seems like the kind of game that might get a better reception on PC, and Halo: Spartan Assault was dead on arrival as a critical bomb.
Sorry Xbox One fans, you’ll have to wait for the momentum to pick up, just like PlayStation 4 owners.
The remaining two games are Xbox 360 titles that will close out the month from June 16th to June 30th. Charlier Murder is an odd looking old-school beat ’em up game with a cartoonish violent sense of style. I’ve never heard of it, but I’m not too interested. The better of the two games is Super Street Fighter 4: Arcade Edition, the ultimate realization of Capcom’s amazing fighting game, just in time for the paid DLC update to add more characters.
Can’t go wrong with Street Fighter 4. It’s one of the best games of the generation, even if many sometimes forget to include it.
Two great games, so we are already doing better than months past in Games With Gold, but the ratio has now gotten a bit harder to fulfill into a passing grade. I’m sure Microsoft will come around and get this Games With Gold to the same level of respect that the Instant Game Collection allows.
