Four big name games are available for free throughout all of April for Xbox One and Xbox 360 owners as part of the Xbox Live Games With Gold program. Those of you who are subscribed to Xbox Live Gold can currently pick up a free digital copy of Ryse right now for the Xbox One, which will be available between April 1st and April 30th.

As noted by Major Nelson, Ryse regularly is available for $19.99, but it’s now free for those with an Xbox Live Gold subscription.

On the Xbox 360 side, you’ll have Darksiders, which will be available between April 1st and April 16th. It, too, is also regularly priced at $19.99. Assassin’s Creed: Revelations will be free for XBL Gold subscribers between April 16th and April 30th, and – you guessed it – it’s also regularly priced at $19.99. Last but not least is The Walking Dead: The Telltale Series – Season 2, which will be available between April 16th and May 16th.

Now even if you don’t own an Xbox 360, you can still grab a copy of the Xbox 360 games thanks to Microsoft’s backwards compatibility feature for the Xbox One.

So it’s pretty cool being able to play some of the older Xbox 360 games that you may have missed out on via the Xbox One backwards compatibility feature.

While paying for access to multiplayer is a pretty lame maneuver on the console manufacturers’ part (especially when a lot of games use peer-to-peer connections instead of dedicated servers), at least Microsoft gives gamers some valuable games in the process. Sony, as we’ve seen with their PS Plus offerings over the last several months, have been giving gamers scraps while skimping on quality titles, and they force people to pay for the online multiplayer.

We’ll see how well Nintendo does when they enter into the paid multiplayer arena this fall. It’s not a welcomed change, and the fact that you can only rent old SNES games for a limited time, for free, is also kind of a crappy move.

Anyway, the first two of the four Games With Gold are available right now, which includes Ryse and Darksiders.

(Main image courtesy of Marina)