antstream arcade .pc,x box consoles

[charlie chong]

apparently this is a cloud based retro game service where you can stream old games and compete with other players and play new special modes etc
i imagine it's all a bit laggy for us but it has some good titles amongst it's 293 arcade titles and you can try a version on pc for free that has advertisements so i might give it an install.
some cave stuff we've not seen in a while like uo poko , espgaluda, pink sweets and muchi muchi pork
here's the game list
https://www.antstream.com/games
anyone tried this?

[TransatlanticFoe]

On xbox it's £30 for a year, £80 for "lifetime" - which might not be more than 1 year and probably has caveats (whoops we've renamed the service so the lifetime is up, please pay us again). That's fairly crap for a service whose content may change at any time - it's not very transparent as to what is likely to come and go (including the service itself - hiya Stadia). There's also a lot of duplication, which is fine to push nostalgia buttons but is artificially inflating the number of titles on there - stuff like Dizzy is on multiple home computers, Mega-Lo-Mania and Cannon Fodder (for example) are on Amiga/SNES/Mega Drive.

I don't know why retro games have been shoved into the worst possible methods of playing them - subscription services, mini hardware and now streaming. It's probably not actually streaming, more like an emulator with always online DRM - let's be honest, these ROMs download in seconds so it makes no sense to stream the game from a remote server. If they genuinely are streaming it, it'll be awful. There is no need to have this via streaming, except to control (i.e. milk) the revenue.

Plenty of these games are available elsewhere - there are a lot of names I recognise from the Evercade lineup. The interesting bits are somehow there are Star Wars games and there's some good arcade stuff on there - but let's face it, it's the worst way to play any of them.

[cave hermit]

Cloud based emulation for 16-bit games sounds like an awful joke when even the shittiest laptop on the market still has sufficient resources to run PSX and up, not to mention a single streaming game session would likely consume several times the data required to just download the rom locally.