Game Review: ‘Antstream Arcade’

July 20, 2023

Written by Daniel S. Liuzzi

Fans of retro games, may they be gamers of the past or present, always try to find a way to play some of the old classics to either pay respects to the forefathers of modern gaming OR to relive past glory. Either way, it’s hard to get a hold of functional classic game consoles. This is where Anstream comes in to try to help gamers get in touch with the classics with their Arcade.

 

 

Antstream has brought its massive collection of classic games to the Xbox and PC for the first time as it was previously only available on PlayStation and Nintendo. The game library consists of games from Arcade, Atari 8-Bit, Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Commodore 64, DOS, Game Boy, Atari Lynx, Genesis, MSX, NES, PlayStation 1, SNES, ZX Spectrum, MSX2, ATARI 5200, Amiga, and Amstrad. Before you get too excited, I’m afraid to say…the games are not ported well.

 

 

 

 

While trying to play some of the games, I’ve encountered a lot of screen tearing, stuttering, and at times the images on the screen become way too pixilated (like when you’re watching a video at 720p and suddenly it’s 144p). The sound of the games causes a strange crunching sound. True I’m playing on a next-gen console, but you can have better picture quality through an emulator and risk getting a virus on your computer.

 

What really irks me about all this poor video and sound quality, along with issues with the game not responding to the controls is this… You have to pay a subscription to play these games as this is a “Streaming service”. If I was not given this to try for free, I would have asked for my money back.

 

Overall, I would honestly say to stay away from this. Sound issues, delays in image movement, loss of picture quality, screen-tearing/stuttering, and delayed control response, a good chunk of the game library that’s made up of games no one has ever heard of (or are just terrible even from 70s/80s/and 90s standards), and they want you to pay for it? To be fully honest, I don’t know what the goal of this was, it seemed they really want you to partake in “community” challenges and whatnot, but I just want to play some classic Rampage, and other classic games, but with the above-mentioned reasons, I did not find the Antstream Arcade fun and I don’t know if I could, in good conscience, rate this but out of 10 stars, it’s a 2.

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