Xbox's 'Biggest Content Drop In History' Sees Over 1400 Retro Games Arrive Next Week

Lots of retro games???
"As part of the cloud-based Antstream Arcade"
Oh.

The pricing sounds like a great value, if you're into cloud (or even subscription) gaming.
But I want to buy and keep my games, not get a subscription that vanishes as soon as I stop paying for it! And of course, this has the additional issues brought on by streaming.

This is so bizzare but now it makes sense why they delisted emulation on Retail.
It's a pretty good alternative at an amazing price but it was never going to solve the exclusive problem.
You'll never see a Nintendo game on a service like that.

You can see the games they have available to play on the product website.

It's... not good.

This isn't anything close to the kind of selection you would find on, for example, the NES or Super NES online service. I expected it to be missing a few big titles, sure, but going through these expecting anything good, let alone recognizable, is pretty futile.

Cool, just really wish there was a non-streaming option. Even if it was a paid pro feature or something... I mean modern games aren't the best for streaming so hate to think how bad retro games will fare.

Love a good Retro Release. I have most of the games on my Mini Amiga 500, but this is a great way for gamers to experience them at a great price. I'm very tempted how-ever to give this a try, especially with online highscores... would love to compare my R-Type high score with others, always thought I was pretty good at that game haha!

I tried this on my laptop a while back and while I don't usually have much luck with streaming these old games played fine. I think it's great this will be available, but honestly I don't think I'd spend enough time with it to warrant the sub. Maybe a bit further down the line when it's discounted.

Hope this appears on Free Play Days soon, I’d love to give it a trial first.

Think £9.99/$9.99pa might be the sweet-spot to lure in us oldies who want to hunt down some nostalgia.

Seems most or all of those games you could download the whole thing using less data than it would take to stream these games for an hour.
A quick google has Double Dragon 2 at being around 257kb for the NES ROM which is about 3 seconds of streaming video at a low bitrate.

Why streaming? Why not purchase it and it's just an emulator with builtin games. I used to have a raspberry pi which just had emulators and loads of preloaded games. Do that just on Xbox. Can't be that difficult

@Deformedpye I seriously doubt its a "difficulty" issue, its almost certainly going to be a license issue. Making an Xbox emulator would require them to renegotiate with the content providers (we saw what this did to the Wii to Wii U virtual console.) By having it streamed they don't have to deal with licencing every time they add a supported platform.

@NorthwestEagle It has many great titles, especially if you are into 8/16 bit home micros. I'll try the one year option first but if they play well I see me going for the lifetime subscription.

@Amigator - Can you give some examples?
Looking at the list- where are the Marios? The Castlevanias? The Dragon Quests or Final Fantasy games? The NES had a tremendous library of classics but none of them are here. The same goes for the Super NES - where are the games that made the system famous?

@NorthwestEagle come on man, your listed examples are all ongoing franchise games. The likes of Nintendo won't allow streaming on none native platforms. However look past the more famous examples and you will have a ton of fun.

@Amigator Was thinking the same, will deffo try the 12 month first. I'll be honest though, the nostalgia kicked in big time when I saw this post and I do have pretty much all the amiga games. I'm quite interested in how the online leaderboards will work which is something that didn't exist in the Amiga games.

Games are not called content.

@themcnoisy - And that really says it all, doesn't it? The premise is nostalgia but, for example, the Game Boy list only gives you Banishing Racer, Jeep Jamboree and Super Hunchback. The NES limits you to less than ten games. I've never played 8 Eyes, have you?
The PS1 category gives just TWO games to pick from- 40 Winks and Loaded.
I know it's hard to legitimately license games for retro collections, but still...

Is there a list to view for games? Seems like there are only 2 irrelevant ps1 games and other games that no interest in

@Rmg0731 -
https://www.antstream.com/games

This is the list of games for the service.

Seems like a good selection. Earthworm Jim, Mortal Kombat. Some games I used to play on my Genesis. But the steaming part doesn't convince me.

@NorthwestEagle I'm surprised they got anything for Nintendo platforms at all to be honest. Were you seriously expecting to see the series you mentioned previously on this collection? There's no way any Nintendo games were going to be available on rival platforms especially when the Nintendo Online Sub exists and the others have collections that you can already purchase in one form or another (FF Pixel Remasters, Castlevania Collections etc.). Seems to be aimed more at the Home Computer gamer rather than Console gamer TBH.

Some serious nostalgia hits for me in the full game list. Sensible Soccer, Wizball, Speedball, Cannon Fodder, Pinball Dreams/Illusions... and that's just the Amiga section.

Some of my absolute favourites missing though - Stunt Car Racer, Rainbow Islands, Chase HQ...

Probably not going to pick it up straight away due to the backlog, but looks like a really good collection for me at least.

If you can't afford to license the nostalgia, don't advertise it. This collection is crap.

Could be interesting but they need to make sure they offer a trial, even a one day trial, so people can test the service before putting money down. There are a lot of variables here; quality of emulation, quality of streaming, quality of games etc.

EDIT: Hang on, it's $29.99 a year which equals around £22, yet the UK is still being charged £29.99 - and it's based in the UK! Rip off Britain strikes again. 🙄

On the one hand, this is a historic moment and Xbox is the first console on board. On the other hand, this is another example why unofficial methods, not just piracy but playing your own backups, is still the only way to play many games. Too bad emulators were delisted on Xbox.

Another streaming service? PASS

@NorthwestEagle I knew you were going to mention this kind of titles. Thank god this is not the case here. You can find all these games you mentioned in all kind of platforms/packages. Personally I'm tired of the same old japanese collections. They're not the be all end all of gaming. The point is to find some obscure or games you don't know. Some examples from what I've seen so far. Mega lo mania, addictive strategy. All the Alien Breeds, top down shooters, very popular back in the day. Cadaver, isometric action adventure. Kick off 2, the best two player game of the 80s. Jack the nipper. Skidz, very difficult but charming arcade. There are many great games in there and I haven't checked the whole list, I want to be surprised when I'll sit down to play.

This is a solid collection. I also like the lifetime option at a reasonable price. Being a streaming site makes it a little sketchy, might not be around forever.

In a perfect world, roms would be legal and free for games after like 15 years and available on a trustworthy non profit site. But that will never happen.

@dmcc0 Oh man! Some great titles you mentioned there. Sensible soccer is the best footy game ever. Cannon Fodder, addictive as hell. Speedball, I wonder if we'll be able to play online 2 player, that would be neat. And of course Pinball Dreams/Fantasies! Seriously guys, try them. Even if you don't like pinball you'll love them, best pinball games ever.

@Amigator - Nah. There's a good reason why these are obscure - they're crap nobody wanted to play even back then.

@NorthwestEagle I get a feeling you are just being negative for the fun of it.

@NorthwestEagle It seems you don't have a clue about gaming. How old are you?

@Amigator - Been gaming since the Atari days. Old enough to know trash when I see it. Grateful I'm not dumb enough to think garbage like Eggers is somehow great. Thankful we can curate out trash like Sensible Soccer.
Tell ya what. Let's give it a year. If this bilge is still up and active, I owe you a Coke.

Would be keen if it had local download. Zero interest in streaming only.

@themightyant I'd be intrigued to read that as I do a lot of cloud deployments through work. 👍
But looking at the list it looks like things that could all run in your browser. Maybe that's what they're doing and presenting a front end for consles?

I very much appreciate what this is trying to do.
But lets face it, for someone like myself who emulates everything already, the content choice is pretty restricted and I will always prefer playing local content over streaming.

Just because I wont be using it doesn't mean I don't appreciate the offering though, and I hope they find their market no matter how niche it is..

@elpardo1984 Rather than it just being a platform to play these games, it appears there are other features like setting high scores and challenging your friends, leaderboards, community competitions etc. I'm quite excited by this kind of approach as you can only normally play these games by yourself or having a friend round.

@NorthwestEagle Well, as I said, considering you were expecting "all the Marios and Castlevanias and Final Fantasies" in this collection, you don't know anything about games. And calling sensi soccer trash? Give us a break...

I don't understand this.... I dare bet the cloud streaming costs to maintain this service running has to be way more expensive than porting quick emulators for every platform they want this on.

@RetroMan71 I prefer to play on the original machines too. Today I received some Amiga/C64 games I bid for on eBay. But I also love having them on a unified dashboard with their artworks and info and leaderboards as you said. The price is a steal.

@NorthwestEagle Oof... you are not kidding. It's like a list of retro castoffs that no one is particularly interested in, with a few exceptions.

Bear in mind that for some people here, those games are our Marios, Sonics, Megamans and Banjos, so I think we should respect their excitement and the video games history, generally speaking.

This just makes me wish Xbox got the non-Nintendo Arcade Achieves like PS does.

Finally! All of the Super Star Wars games!

I'm honestly really into it. Would love to be able play all of these Star Wars games, arcade games, Sensible Soccer, and some other stuff without relying on my old hardware and/or having to buy them one at a time. I hope they have a trial so you can see how it runs with your set up before buying it (though I suppose you could request a refund). I'd also like to know how often games fall off the service/how likely it is and what happens if the service shuts down-if you're paying $80 for a lifetime subscription, it'd be kinda bogus if it shut down in 2.5 years, for example. Also, do they give you like a one year warning or anything like that? Or will it just go away one day?

I like it...but I'm a bit hesitant.

Used to run this on my smart TV before it went subscription based. So tempted to do the lifetime subscription.

I wonder how the achievements work for this?

OMG, the Dizzy games are on it!

You could give some these folks a million dollars and they'd complain it wasn't in 20s. Jeez Louise, if ya don't like it don't buy it. It's a solid offer. I'm not even a big retro fan and I'm tempted to at least try it.

FROM GENUINE ANTSTREAM USER: I have been using Antstream for years, on-and-off, on my puter. I'm confused as to whether I will need a second subscription to use it on Xbox, or if I can just log-in.

There's also no mention of the unique "selling points" of Antstream such as local and online multiplayer for traditionally single player games, tournaments, Achievements, earning special "currency" that can be traded for unlocking extra game modes, to name a few.

If it's just the basic single player games with none of these extra awesome things, or if I have to pay for another subscription, I'm out.

@NorthwestEagle thise games are Flippin cool dude

Oh no !?!?!?! Retro games are the worst type of games for cloud streaming. Any latency at all ruins them and makes them virtually unplayable.

I've used this service before on PC and it has worked very very well. I really like it, sub ordered by me. 👍

@Illisia I too am wondering if my PC account is linked to this or totally separate.

"Can't wait" to experience these games, that requires ultra fast reflexes, with extra input lag, due to the stream. Including drops in the stream, that causes plenty of deaths. Such a "great" experience 🤣

Why not make the games downloadable instead?

Love retro games so looking forward to arcade classics double dragon, bubble bobble and spectrum games like manic miner and horse goes skiing

80 quid or Emulation…. Tough choice kids

Funny how MS is being 'blocked' by the CMA because they fear they could 'potentially' monopolise Cloud gaming yet here we have a 'Competitor' to Game Pass Cloud offering many more titles and not blocked from 'competing' on Microsofts own Console.

Whether the games are as 'appealing', new or not is irrelevant. Its still competing for your 'time' and money. You can't play both Game Pass and this Simultaneously so both 'compete' for your time/money.

Not only that, its actually helping their 'Competitor' to establish themselves and a Fanbase. The games list could grow and grow - especially with more 'income' coming in from more players buying into their service. Its another example of why the CMA are so wrong....

Got this on the Epic game store for free a few years ago. It’s actually pretty good.

Streaming huh? Guess I'll just stick with retro consoles and emulation.

Ok.. So no more retroarch because ... there was this product in the pipe of Xbox store... Too bad we can't add OUR games...

No E.T.? no thank you.

Just release it as downloadable. I have zero interest in cloud-based anything.

I'll just keep my modded OG Xbox

Makes sense to keep it on PlayStation, as it makes a fair bit of miney on there.

Though Game Pass players won't have to pay full retail for it.

@NorthwestEagle you're obviously not Gen X. There's virtually every great ZX speccy game. All the Amiga and C64 libraries. Hundreds of arcade games which were awesome in the 80s, even better with age (mostly). Hundreds of games across Atari consoles too. Alien Breed, Bubble Bobble, R-Type ... Simon the Sorcerer . Anyone who lived through this golden age of gaming will easily recognise many titles.

@jedinite - Or maybe, just maybe, not every person in that generation has the same kind of admiration for the kind of content that came out of Atari during that time.

Given that it destroyed itself and nearly bankrupted the entire industry, there's quite a few who feel the same way.

Besides that, if I really wanted to play old Atari games, I could either switch on my Heavy Sixer or go buy one of the dozens of dirt cheap Flashback systems on the market, none of which require a subscription.

Yes, that's right. I still own my old Atari. It's still hooked up via a modulator to a CRT in the den. I still have early 80s memories of trying to get the damn thing to display right on a TV with the little antenna screws in the back.

And guess what? It may have been better than nothing, but Donkey Kong still looked like a mushroom on it, and Pac Man on that system was only good if you had head trauma.

See, that's the thing- old cranky guy as I am, I lived through the days when those games were all you had. It was crap then and it still is.

@NorthwestEagle you neglected to mention the most important systems imo. Amiga, Speccy and the few hundred or so arcade games - and you can't deny, arcades in the 70-80s had some awesome titles.