One of the publishers that I find most irksome in this industry is Warner Brothers. They currently own most of the properties of defunct published Midway Games, and by extension, Atari Games. Despite owning the rights to a lot of great game franchises, they only seem interested in Mortal Kombat. They’ve done dick all with everything else. This includes some of my all-time favorites, like Tapper and Smash T.V.
It’s enough that I’ve considered these games to be unavailable, or as a recent study termed them, “critically endangered.” However, that’s not technically true because they are available. You can find them on Antstream Arcade.
While Antstream Arcade has been around for a while, I have an innate dislike for streaming games. I’d rather own them in some form. I don’t like the idea that they may be ephemeral. Relying on a corporation to allow me to do what I want is not something I can trust. However, I feel that the game preservation goals of Antstream Arcade are earnest ones. As I heard someone mention, publishers may be more willing to allow games to be re-released on streaming services, so this is a way to get at licenses that would otherwise be out of reach.
With its recent Xbox release, I was given the opportunity to try out the PC version of Antstream Arcade myself. Since it’s been I was able to get a round in with Tapper, I decided it was worth a shot. As it turns out, there are more reasons to try out Anstream Arcade than just easy access to critically endangered games.
Pixels besmirched
I first want to get the technical side out of the way, as that’s my first concern when playing streamed games. I tried the Xbox Cloud Gaming service a while back, and while I thought it was fine, I hated seeing compression artifacts everywhere. The question on the top of my mind was if Antstream Arcade would be any different. It Isn’t.
Note that my internet connection is probably more ideal than most people have access to. My apartment has a full fibre connection. The only time the internet touches copper is the Cat8 ethernet cable between my modem and NIC. It’s a 1.5Gbps connection, but my NIC only supports 1Gbps, which is still a lot faster than most people have.
My main test game was 1996’s Metal Slug. It’s known for its transcendental pixel art graphics, which provide a much busier pixel than, say, Chack’n Pop. It’s also a game that I’ve been playing through repeatedly recently, trying to drive down how many continues it takes me to finish it. So, I figured it was the best candidate since I know it inside out and can see if any added input lag has a huge effect on me.
Firstly, the visuals suck in a lot of places. While the image is sharp at the best of times, even on a 4K monitor, a lot of motion causes it to lose fidelity. A lot of noise gets added to the image, which is less than ideal. How much noise depended on the scene and the time of day. It was always legible and didn’t affect gameplay much, but was certainly less than ideal compared to the Arcade Archives or Metal Slug Anthology releases.
Marco!
It took me 7 continues to finish Metal Slug on Antstream Arcade, which is in comparison to my best effort of 5 continues. However, to be fair to Antstream, this was mostly because I was waiting for the polish on my nails to harden, so I was avoiding the ends of my fingers while playing on an arcade stick. I didn’t really notice any input lag. There probably is some, just based on the technology, but it was imperceptible to me. There was slowdown, however, but it never struck me as more than the slowdown that Metal Slug normally has. It slowed down in all the regular spots. Spots where I was used to seeing it. It isn’t added slowdown, is what I mean.
You can’t, however, touch the settings on any of the magnitudes of games I tested. Like in an actual arcade, the DIP switches are locked away. This gives an advantage to home versions, like the Arcade Archives or various compilations, where you can usually tweak the difficulty and scoring modifiers. This is probably not a problem for most people. The biggest issue I had with it was with Metal Slug, the blood is off, and there’s no way to turn it on. This was set this way for North American releases, but Arcade Archives lets you turn the blood back on.
What’s even more vexing is that you can’t remap inputs. You’re stuck with what they give you, and that means the inputs for an Arcade Stick will be exactly the same as those on an Xbox Controller, and that’s rarely ideal.
Pound for pound, I’d rather play a downloaded, local copy of the games available. However, it’s worth noting that something like that can really put the hurt on your bank account. Just buying the Arcade Archives versions of the three Metal Slug games (1, 2, and X) that are featured on Antstream Arcade puts you just 10$ short of an annual subscription. So, you’d have to weigh that based on your personal situation and preferences.
Outside the cabinet
What I didn’t expect to grab me was the online challenges and tournaments. Each game has a set of challenges associated with them that can provide you with new ways to interact with some of these games. Going back to Metal Slug, as an example, one challenge starts you off on the second level with only a pistol, and the ability to pick up new weapons is disabled. So, it challenges you to get the highest score possible with only a pistol and grenades. You then get ranked on that.
Various tournaments also run at all times. They pick a game, then give you a challenge, such as scoring as high as possible on a single life, then you’re ranked against the other competitors. The prize is just gems, a currency used for participating in challenges. That’s not too exciting, and the gems are so easy to come by that they’re practically inconsequential, but at least you have some skin in the game.
The challenges are what keep me coming back to Antstream Arcade. It’s not even necessarily that I want to compete or win. It’s more that it gives me a reason to dive into games that I don’t know very well and try to build my skill and confidence in them. It’s a helpful metric to see how close I am to mastering a game, and it’s something I appreciate that I don’t necessarily see in other releases of arcade titles.
On the other hand, some of the challenges aren’t well thought through. Going back to Metal Slug, there are a couple of “survive as long as you can” objectives that were clearly not tested by anyone intimately familiar with the game. One was surviving the submarine section on the last level, which can be gamed by leaving a plane alive and just dodging its bomb repeatedly. Doing so makes the section never end, so you’re never in peril and can continue until the timer runs out. That is not how I think they expected it to be done.
The future of retro
That’s also really the only online multiplayer available. You can duel over challenges, but that’s once again competing for score. There is local multiplayer when it’s supported, but right now, that’s all you get in terms of direct competition.
There’s also some badly needed housekeeping on the service. It uses a recommendation and category system that you’d find on Netflix, which isn’t all that helpful. I had an easier time keeping an external list open on a website to figure out what was available and what wasn’t. Then I could just search for it and find it that way.
Antstream Arcade also has titles from other platforms, such as microcomputers and consoles. For whatever reason, though, you can’t browse by console.
They are planning on overhauling everything in what they’ve termed “Project Vision.” However, I can’t find any hard information on what this will include. They’ve teased multiplayer and UI upgrades, so we’ll see what this involves. I’m interested since any number of my complaints may be addressed.
The quarter hole
Antstream Arcade is also noticeably lacking content from certain publishers, which isn’t all that surprising. While Namco, Taito, SNK, and Atari (both Atari Games/Midway and Atari Interactive) are on board, we’re lacking other big players like Capcom, Sega, and Konami. I have no doubt that Antstream Arcade would want content from these publishers, so I can only imagine they’re continually pushing for a deal.
However, there are still an advertised 1300 games on Antstream Arcade, so I haven’t hit the bottom of what I want to play and discover. It’s always going to be growing, so a lack of content is just something you’re going to expect. It being a streaming service, there’s also a potential for content to be removed when a contract expired, so that’s something else to keep in mind.
But for all my complaints, I still like Antstream Arcade. It’s not a perfect service, but it’s cheap enough that it’s worth having for access to games unavailable elsewhere and challenges for some of my favorites. Having more than one method for preservation is always ideal. I always have the option to buy Metal Slug on other platforms. On the other hand, I don’t have the option to buy Tapper elsewhere, but that’s not Antstream Arcade’s fault. They’re just doing what they can. So where you at, Warner Brothers?
