Antstream Ltd. has announced that their platform of retro games, previously available on Windows, browsers, and mobile devices, will be coming to Xbox consoles. Running natively on the console’s hardware, Antstream’s platform offers unrestricted access to some of gaming’s best alongside offering community-made challenges and tournaments to compete with players all over the world. As a platform, games will also be added monthly to the service as well as new features. Two player couch coop is also supported.
Antstream launches next week, but you can pre-order access to the service over on the Xbox Store here. The regular edition of Antstream is an annual subscription that must be renewed at $29.99, or you can opt to buy the ‘Lifetime Pass Edition’ which will grant you permanent access to Antstream’s platform and its games for $79.99.
Have a gander at the full game list right over here, on Antstream’s official website.
Im probably misunderstanding what it means to run something natively but I think this is wrong? When I tried Antstream sometime back you couldn’t download the games. It was streaming only.
I wouldn’t take this as fact or anything but a reviewer on YouTube said that the PC freemium version is streaming and the subscription version has an option to download. Of course the random YouTube cheapass didn’t subscribe to demonstrate this, so he could’ve been talking out of his a**.
I have found this to be fantastic value (I pre-ordered the lifetime subscription).
I dropped a ticket to ask if they will eventually allow you to use the same subscription on PC & Mobile and they said it’s something they are looking into.
The word stream is in the name., there is essentially no control over any options. You launch the game and play it. There are some audio options in the pause menu, and you can make save states for each title, but not much else.
Neither is a deal breaker as the games are so small they stream perfectly (in my experience)
The emulation can be a little wonky. As I mentioned earlier the sound in Mortal Kombat is a bit garbled and the mix, particularly the music is weird, but the game plays great.
Yeah I understand that it streams but I was hoping that it would stream the game and then have your console apply filters and so on. Much like how the console is handling the save states and the UI to access the games. It would be the most efficient form of streaming as well (a 320 by 240 pixel stream instead of a 1080p or 4K stream).
I wrote a tweet thread about this many years ago but emulation really needs to consider extending to CRT emulation so people can actually choose what CRT TVs they are playing on for the complete experience.
All this talk about Mortal Kombat makes me extremely disappointed that the Mortal Kombat Kollection is not available through BC.
I still plan to check this out (I spent my entertainment budget on SF6 and a bunch of YouTube Superchats ) so I’m going to get it regardless of any other features.
Personally the old school arcade games from 80-85 really appeal to me. Someone posted a video of BurgerTime running on it and that’s the stuff I’m looking for.
This also gives me a lot of hope in stuff I’d like to see in the future. One thing that holds up games like, say, Virtua Fighter 3 to hit consoles are the added expectations and work that goes beyond porting the game on its own emulator. Adding achievements, online play, getting an ESRB rating, adding options, etc. are all added hurdles preventing these games from being considered.
So I’m hoping this opens the door to a ton of classic SEGA Arcade games to hit such a platform. Forget all those above mentioned hurdles and just feed the ROM to the emulator. Done.
) so I’m going to get it regardless of any other features.