As you may have surmised, there’s a new gaming streaming service in town. It’s been on PC for a while but now it’s here for the Xbox too. That service is Antstream Arcade. Antstream’s pitch is simple…they’re supplying you with over 1300 games to play on your Xbox! Sounds great, right? And not only can you buy a year’s access for $30 (that’s .08 a day), you can buy a lifetime pass to Antstream for only $80! Honestly, that’s a pretty sweet deal. Where are those lifetime memberships, Netflix? Huh?
Now this sounds like a deal too good to be true, especially with the prices of Live and Plus. And to an extent, it is. What Antstream is actually offering is 1300+ retro games. Most of that stuff is vintage computer and arcade games with a healthy mix of really random things thrown in. Want a couple of PS1 games? They’re there…but not the ones you’d expect (Loaded and 40 Winks). Want some SNES? How does Operation Logic Bomb sound? Or the Star Wars SNES trilogy? Not bad right? You a big fan of the Commodore 64? There’s plenty of stuff here. Same goes for the Spectrum and a few other more obscure systems. There’s a bit of everything in here and that makes things fun.
Antstream Arcade approaches their GUI from a weird direction however. The main screen of the game lists a number of activities and challenges and separates games out into a format similar to Amazon Prime where you have a series of horizontal scrolling bars with suggestions of different genres to play. Tournaments, Acheievements and messages are also shown at the top of the screen and the games that are trending or with Giant Slayer competitions going on are also shown near the top. You start with a number of gems and can spend them in various tournaments as well. Yes, you bought a subscription and it removes the gem costs for games, but you can earn them by competing and performing tasks and eventually level up tiered challenges and other stuff. There’s a lot of interactivity here if you’re competitive.
But what about the 1300 games, you ask? They’re all there…but you’ll have to find them. As of this article, the best way we found to see most of those games was to use the search function and not put anything into the search bar, generating a huge list of games that the system couldn’t even keep up with for tile thumbnails. That turns out to be a blessing because you basically can’t tell what any of the games are in Antstream Arcade once the tiles load unless you’re familiar with each thumbnail. Before loading, there are simply titles so if you read and scroll fast, you can see most of what’s available.
That being said, there’s a lot of content here. But content isn’t always good and some of these old games are legitimately only good for archival purposes. They simply aren’t fun. If you’re looking for an intense nostalgia kick, this might be your thing, but if you want a bunch of old mainstream C64, Arcade, Amiga, Genesis, and other games, you’re out of luck. Just to give you an idea, there’s a version of Arcus Odyssey on here (different title though), a number of Cave and Data East shmups, some random platformers and puzzlers including the rather obscure Uo Poko, plenty of early SNK games and a bunch more. It’s not that there aren’t enough good games, it’s that there’s a lot of chaff to sort through. You’re probably not frothing to play the Dizzy games for example, or Steg The Slug. The arcade version of Boulder Dash doesn’t hold up too well either. Of course you’re looking forward to a rousing game of Dunk Dream or Spelunker II, right? You get the idea. There’s a lot of just stuff that doesn’t really pull in most players and you definitely aren’t going to be playing the entire library…assuming you can find what you want to play.
But what about the games themselves? There’s a lot riding on getting a streaming service to play correctly and that’s the key to Antstream Arcade succeeding on the Xbox. Once you select a game Anstream drops to a preview page that shows details and lets you confirm your selection to play the game. This is often the only way to tell what a game is thanks to the title issues with the main page. Additionally, the system has a bit of lag to it so if you select a game, then click the A button again to confirm, you immediately leave and go back to the main screen because the “Play” button hasn’t loaded yet! Grr.
Once you’re inside a game in Antstream Arcade (Boogie Wings from Data East was our first choice), it’s time to play. The system gives you a rundown of where the keys are mapped and then you have to add credits (in the case of an arcade game) and play. Off you go and let the good times roll! It turns out that while it didn’t launch as functional, Antstream also has local co-op now and it works, so there’s plenty of fun to be had having buddies over to play a wealth of arcade games and old classics! However, there’s this other little niggly issue with Antstream Arcade and it’s a dirty word that streaming fans don’t like to hear: latency. That’s right, Antstream Arcade is a streaming service. That means that when you press a button, that button press has to go out of your system, through the internet, to Antstream’s servers, be logged on a system there, and the response image of what you’re doing is relayed back to your computer through the internet. Now as you might imagine, there are a lot of ways for things to go wrong between your couch and Phantom Server X up in the Himalayas or Ohio or whatever weird place they’re in.
The glaring and painful problem with Antstream Arcade on the Xbox is that the latency is just poor enough to interfere with twitch gaming. Not Twitch the social media platform, but actual twitch gaming, the kind of stuff that takes minute and plentiful control responses in order to effectively play. You know, like arcade games. And SNES and Genesis games. And old C64 games. Hmmmm, isn’t that the majority of the Antstream library? Uh-oh. It turns out that there’s a tiny hesitation on most Antstream games between the input and response times. It’s less than a second to be sure, but it’s noticeable enough if you’ve spent any measure of time with these old games (and some of us owned most of them, often as arcade boards) that the games are essentially unplayable. Your response time doesn’t matter if your ship doesn’t move enough when you press the button and in a shmup or a platformer, that’s certain death.
If the majority of games on Antstream were point-and-clicks and RPGs and tactical strategy games, there’d be no issue here. But with the type of games prominently featured on Antstream Arcade, you’re going to be struggling to play games you might even be exceptional at. Take for example ESPGaluda, a rather well-known Cave game featured on Antstream. The response time is pretty good but there’s a hair of delay here and there and some weird speed-ups and slow-downs. I know this because I have the game on my arcade cab and play it regularly. It just doesn’t feel quite right. The controls don’t work quite the same, the autofire button is missing, and the whole experience feels subtly off. The same can be said for a number of other shmups and platformers like the SNK and Taito stuff (many of which I also have arcade versions of). They just don’t feel right because of the latency in Antstream Arcade. I won’t even get into how I blew through the entire first level of Super Star Wars in a handful of minutes due to an odd high-speed glitch.
That’s not all either. In addition to odd response issues (and it’s not the internet connection…other stuff works fine), Antstream has some other big faults. First and foremost is the complete and utter lack of control mapping. Many of the games are mapped to odd button choices and there’s no way to change it. You want screen options? Widescreen to fill that big TV perhaps? Tough luck. There simply aren’t any options available with Antstream. It’s either play it as they have it or don’t. The like it or lump it approach in these days of plenty for gamers is a bit of a turn-off and not every gamer is going to like it, that’s for sure.
And speaking of how things look on your TV, Antstream Arcade drops the ball there too. Most retro compilations and players have a variety of screen options in order to simulate the old CRT TVs that games were played on. There’s none of that here either. Nicer looking games like the aforementioned ESPGaluda look rough and pixellated on Antstream and a number of the games are clearly blurry or suffer from other visual issues. In short, you can absolutely tell that this is a streamed emulator, not an effective one. For those of you that were *cough* playing the Xbox emulators before the ban *cough cough*, you’ll know that the Xbox is more than capable of extremely high-quality emulation that looks fantastic on a modern TV. But you aren’t getting that here. Instead you get an intermittent picture that’s sometimes optimal and sometimes not but generally looks a bit worse than the original hardware. That’s a pretty big letdown for those of us wanting to relive some glory days!
Sound is also a big factor here and to be honest, Antstream Arcade sounds a bit tinny. It’s weird because all the games sound right but it’s more like the treble got cranked way up and the bass got clicked down a few notches. It’s not that the music sounds wrong…more like the mix is subtly off. With the number of games available, some of them certainly sound right. Impossible Mission sounded correct (and it’s even harder than some of us remembered), but of course the latency made it a challenge even if you know what to do. Some of the modern Cave and Psikyo stuff sounded remarkably empty however, and one can assume that other titles are equally intermittent.
Of course there’s no way to play every game in this insane library and chances are good that almost no player would want to. The tournaments and Giant Slayer competitions will definitely get you to play a few things you wouldn’t normally bother with though. These are neat ideas and if there wasn’t a fair bit of lag going on, the competitions alone would be worth the price of admission here. As it is, they’re a novelty for the patient and without significant changes, players are going to start dropping from Antstream, leaving no one left to casually interact with or compete against in leaderboards. As it is, currently some of the Giant Slayer competitions had 3-4 contestants at any given time and it’s hard to say if that’s going to change. At least you can give a few things a go that you might not have heard of before though!
With Antstream Arcade on the Xbox, you’re getting a pretty massive library of games, but not necessarily all of the things you’d want to play. There’s an absolute ton of fun to be had and the GUI design is quite good, but the latency definitely limits the fun that can be had with some games and the library, while good, isn’t utterly spectacular. You’re getting a lot of play with a membership but it’s a bit of a dice roll how much most people aside from hardcore retro gamers are going to use the service and without changes to the servers and response times on the Xbox, it’s going to be a tough sell for the average player. The lack of controller mapping and screen options also really limits players and not every game is equivalent to its console or arcade counterparts either. All in all, for $30, you’re going to get your money’s worth in play time just messing about on Antstream Arcade and with any luck people will start joining and the servers will be upgraded (and maybe some updates to the options will be added). If that happens, those $80 lifetime memberships will definitely be worthwhile! As it is, Antstream Arcade is a novelty on the Xbox and you can definitely blows some hours, especially if you want to play with friends in local co-op!
This review is based on a digital copy of Antstream Arcade provided by the publisher. It was played on an Xbox Series X using a 1080p Sony TV. Antstream Arcade is also available for PC as a dedicated launcher. The lifetime membership is currently exclusive to the Xbox.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.