In a world filled with emulator-driven handhelds on Amazon.com, and endless amounts of Namco Museums since the 90s, it’s fascinating seeing those ideals collide on the PC with Antstream Arcade. The service is a cloud-based streaming service that allows you to play, save, and dive into a bevy of retro games. The service offers over 1300 games and does enough to make the experience worthwhile. Or at least they make the price worthwhile.
Months ago, I was given the opportunity to try out this cloud-based streaming service that spans multiple generations of gaming experiences across various ancient platforms. What I found was a lot of fun in what it delivers and how it delivers it, but some confusion on cross-platform accounting and seeing what is offered. If you’re looking for a legal way to play cloud-based classics, then this is your place. If you’re expecting to have one account to rule them all or an app that is easily manageable, then you may be left in the dark.
Put your quarter on the arcade machine and call out ‘I got next!’, and let’s get this going.
Arcade and Classic Gaming Bliss
The huge plus about Antstream Arcade is that it delivers the gaming goods as advertised, though some opinions may vary depending on expectations. Some games may not suit the fancy of some gamers, but with the extensive library featured by the company, it should please everyone at some point. The fact that you won’t have to feel guilty or expect the FBI to smash down your door because you have an illegal ROM on your system is a huge plus as well. The library offered by the Antstream developers is completely legit and contractual. Speaking of those contracts, let’s get to the entertainment.
The games featured through Antstream Arcade span from the late 70s through the late 90s, with the occasional spillover into the early 2000s. While I have been perusing Antstream Arcade for a couple of months now, I have seen good licenses come and go, as all their legal games have finite contracts. In this day and age of streaming services, limited contractual legal agreements for streaming certain material shouldn’t be a shocking revelation for most people. Content always comes and goes on streaming services, as Max and Netflix have proven over the years. But like any good streaming service, there is generally no shortage of good content coming and going. Recently, the service has added a bevy of LucasArts games, including some oldies such as Loom, The Dig, and the oddly satisfying Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders. Those titles alone are worth their weight in gold/premium price ($39.99). That wack-a-doodle library of LucasArts games was primo back in the day and will take you days to complete if not weeks. Anyway, the content library is good, as it tugs on the retro-heartstrings of gamers who enjoy revisiting their childhoods. Or experiencing old new things.
Beyond just content, Antstream Arcade also features the ability to co-op with other members of the service, participate in challenges for gems (currency on the service), and participate in tournaments against other players. The latter of the bunch does cost gems to enter, depending on the game and tournament, but it’s a cool way to bring back an old concept called ‘High Score’. That concept was a big deal back in the 80s arcade era when you competed against strangers to be the best. At the end of the day, you left your initials or just the occasional curse word to let people know you were the champ. That concept in Antstream’s app continues that tradition. For example, this month, one interesting community competition is the Zombies Ate My Neighbors tournament, where you go through the game without weapons rescuing helpless people while trying to score the most points. The winner of the tournament gets 15,000 gems, which could probably go a long way for some members. The entire concept of being able to compete inside a community is just cool. The twists and adjustments in the game to make the experience unique show how much the Antstream Arcade devs care about user experience. Anyway, the tournaments seem to be a huge draw, as quite a few people compete in them. The fact that the tournaments refresh every few weeks means there is longevity to the concept.
Outside of paying for tournament entries, the gems can also be used for unlocking challenges. These challenges are base-level requirements, such as scoring the most points in 720 or taking down the final boss in Smash TV. With every entry fee into these challenges, you have the chance of pulling out more worthwhile stacks of gems. The downer about the challenges, which aren’t like the tournaments, is that you must pay to replay. That’s where I suspect the gems go quickly, though shying away from a challenge is tough when you get so close to beating it. I think the challenges are neat, but they certainly aren’t my motivation to keep using this service. The games are the first reason with co-op and tournaments a close second and third.
Regardless of how you play on Antstream Arcade, the fact that you can have single-player experiences across multiple genres that span decades is just a huge plus in my book. I love the additional content, the fact that you can level your account up, and the game-changing tournaments that encourage you to be the best, but the content is vast and as advertised, and the main reason why you should look at this service.
Restructure to avoid confusion
The ugly part of the service’s app is probably going to be the information architecture of the delivery system. The IA of this service needs a bit more love and thought. After a short account creation process and quick login to the app, you’ll be showered with a homepage that features around 300 games. It also features current top-story tournaments that you can participate in with the right number of gems (again, the currency you acquire from daily logins and microtransaction purchases) and a simple menu at the top that breaks everything down for you. That menu is as follows:
- Play Now
- Tournaments
- Achievements
- Messages
- Community
- Search Icon
Having done a little research online, the biggest problem for people is understanding where to find the 1300 games that were advertised on the Antstream Arcade website. If I hadn’t searched out the information and found some answers from a wonderfully informative Reddit thread started by the marketing department of Antstream Arcade, I would have been right there with those concerned gamers thinking they had been bamboozled with only 300 games. There seems to be a fair number of users out there who believe they only can access 300 games. Rest assured you are going to get 1300 games with this service.
To find the entire library of games for this service, at least on my PC side of things, I had to go to the search icon, click the button, and then click ‘All’. This displayed all 1300 games at once and categorized them alphabetically and numerically into smaller pieces. Again, this is purely an information architecture structural problem that probably needs to be rectified to avoid confusion. Maybe turn the ‘Play Now’ into ‘Featured’, much like Max or Netflix does with its content, and then have a separate ‘Games’ tab for people looking for the entire menu of games? Whatever the solution, it probably needs to be fixed.
The other problem, and one that I haven’t really found an answer for is using one’s account across multiple platforms. While the Anstream Arcade website states one license per device, and that’s understandable, knowing if there is a way to download the app on multiple platforms while using a single platform at a time is something of a mystery. From that previously mentioned Reddit thread, it looks as if people are still wondering about that as of one month ago. That needs to be answered or at the very least explained why it can or can’t happen. That’s probably someone other than the marketing department’s job to do so. I can’t imagine that it would be too incredibly difficult to keep track of licenses used across multiple platforms. Adobe has perfected that across PC and Mac. But I’m not a programmer or a system administrator, so I’m not going to assume it’s an easy fix. Strictly speaking from a financial point of view, it would probably push more people to use the service if they knew they could leave home with a mobile device and continue their gaming experience that began on the Xbox.
On that note, let’s wrap this up.
Conclusion
Antstream Arcade is a good retro-gaming service that does a great job of bringing old gaming experiences easily home to gamers, and additional interesting content (tournaments, challenges, etc.) that adds more value to the yearly subscription fee. The service has a vast library and a respectable price point to begin reliving one’s childhood. The application probably needs some additional information architecture work and clarification on how it crosses back and forth between platforms that users online have been wondering about.
