An arcade for the digital age…
As a child of the 1980’s it’s safe to say that I have a soft spot for “retro gaming”. From my misspent childhood diving into my brothers collection of Mega-CD titles, to spending Saturday afternoons under the neon lights of my local arcade, this was MY golden era, and one that brings back a lot of fond memories and nostalgia.
Jumping a few years and I’m now approaching 40, and the games of my childhood have become a thing of the past. For those of us clambering to these fond memories, the retro video game market is a minefield of hard to find games, and scalpers capitalising on our need to relive these gaming masterpieces. While the likes of technology store CeX has somewhat curbed this issue in the UK, the retailer is also seen a one of the markets biggest inflators of driving those prices up. Where the condition of a cartridge, or CD now reigns supreme, the simple premise of a “good game” has been lost to making a few bucks off of someone’s nostalgia.
Step into the ring a new contender in the form of Antstream Arcade - a Netflix-esc streaming platform that caters for gamers looking to reconnect with that bygone era. With Anstream, while you won’t physically own the game, its service adds a literal digital arcade to wherever you game 24/7. With literally thousand of titles to choose from there’s plenty of retro favourites, and old friends to reacquaint yourself with.
Get ready to insert some coins as we take the Xbox client of Antstream Arcade through its paces.
From looking at the clients marketplace icon, the team have gone to town on selling the amount of games that are available. Everywhere you look Antstream are boasting about the mahoosive 1300 games that come from a variety of golden era consoles. Representation is vast here with the likes of the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, SNES, SNK, Arcade, Genesis, Amiga, and more recent such as the PlayStation 1. There’s quite literally a game here to suit everyone tastes, and much like Netflix, Antstream categorises everything with genre lists and a search tool.
Upon first jumping into the client, it’s quite a mixed bag of titles I’d never heard of. The vast majority of the titles available all stem from the likes of the Spectrum, C64, and Amiga families. This isn’t to say that there isn’t some classics, but even for a “gamer” like myself, I was hard pressed to recall what most of them were. While the likes of Chaos Engine, Space Invaders, and Metal Slug are instantly recognisable. Titles such as I’ve Slider Z, and BC Bill past me by. To put it into perspective checking out the available titles list on the Antstream website shows that the C64 has a whopping 358 titles, while the PS1 only has 5. I get that licensing probably plays a big part of what goes on behind the scenes, but in reality there isn’t a lot of variety considering the amount of consoles on offer. It’s not all bad as much like other streaming services Antstream changes its offer of available games each week. So while your favorite may not be on there right now, it could be in the future. The only thing I doubt we will see is any first party Nintendo titles. But one can dream.
In keeping with the arcade feel aside from just playing the games there’s online leaderboards as well as achievements (sadly no Xbox achievements), and challenges. These vary from reaching a milestone high score, to seeing how far you can get on a single credit. It’s a nice way to not only add spice in replaying a familiar game, it also adds plenty of replay value, and bragging rights between friends. Challenges and leaderboards are also updated on a weekly basis in a way to keep things feeling fresh and interesting.
In terms of performance, Antstream Arcade IS a streaming platform. As such your overall experience is only going to be as good as your ISP’s statistics. While this is theoretically true, even with my 68.5MBPS download and 18.2MBPS upload, the client did struggle at various times. What makes this more interesting is that it seems to be intermittent and even varied from game to game. For example playing Chaos Engine resulted in a very choppy framerate for the games opening chapter, while playing the slightly more advanced Re-Loaded on the PS1 offered a silky smooth experience. This was then further hampered by some input lag during Metal Slug. These issues weren’t enough to annoy me as at the end of the day “it is what it is”, but when I can comfortably stream 4k content from other streaming services, it feels like a step backwards. However Antstream is still in its infancy on the Xbox console family, and with a few updates these niggles could be ironed out.
With Antstream Arcade being a streaming service it does require a rolling subscription to access. On the Xbox this works across two very different subscription packages. These subscriptions range from a yearly pass that’s priced at £29.99, and a lifetime subscription for £79.99. For the amount of games on offer the entry level price is quite a good deal. For me the £79.99 lifetime is still a bit of a gamble as the service is still making a name for itself. However that choice is ultimately up to yourself. What I will say is that if you decide to upgrade to the lifetime sub, there’s zero credit given for the £29.99 that you’d have already spent. If you do take the plunge this then technically ups the complete price to a whopping £109.98 with no really benefits.
While it’s not without its drawbacks, the reasoning behind Antstream Arcade is commendable. With the focus on game preservation, utilising a streaming service to do is a really a no brainer. There’s a mammoth amount of gaming oldies available on the service, and under the right conditions this is going to grow even more over time. With plenty of old favourite to reacquaint yourself with, and plenty more to discover along the way, Antstream Arcade is worthy of that £29.99 entry fee. While the £79.99 higher tier is that justifiable yet, in a few years it could be a good investment.
Rating 7.5/10
A year subscription code was kindly provided for the purpose of this review.
Rob Lake - For more comic book and video game chat why not follow us on X/Facebook @GeekCultureRev, TikTok/YouTube @Geekculturereviews, and BlueSky @geekculturereviews.bsky.social
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