Will get to the headline shortly, but first the Antstream elephant in the room…
The big news this week related to the cloud streaming game service Antstream is it is now available on Xbox Game Pass. They are offering a $29.99/year subscription and a new $79.99 lifetime subscription. At first I was really excited to learn about the ability to purchase a lifetime membership, but for those of us who have been playing Antstream for quite some time, this lifetime membership isn’t available to purchase as an option. At least not yet. If we purchase it through Xbox, it means essentially starting over. I’m at level 103 as of this writing and have completed most of the challenges, I have a number of friends sending me challenges and I’m sending challenges back to others. Starting over at level 1, having to get my friends to use a new name, well, that’s not very desirable. Not to mention, I prefer to play Antstream using OTG and arcade controls for several games. This doesn’t really fit the Xbox.
On the plus side, for those that haven’t tried out Antstream yet, enjoy retrogaming (consoles and arcade), and play frequently on Xbox, this is a great way to add a bunch of retrogames from a variety of older console systems and some marquee arcade titles like Mortal Kombat, Pac-Man, Robotron 2084 and a bunch more. Our PGM group has been playing this a good amount of the last year or so and we really dig the custom game challenges. These unique challenges you can’t find anywhere else. Stuff like playing the eggs only bonus area of Joust. There are leaderboards for all of these challenges as well as regular tournaments to challenge other Antstram players. With the gigantic Xbox community, this will bring a ton of new players to the platform and ratchet up the competition.
For the reasons mentioned in the last paragraph and a few more, I’m excited about this, but probably going to pass on buying an Xbox subscription. One minute I think about doing it, just so I can get the 1,000 gamer score and have a lifetime subscription, then I think about what account I’ve already established. Ah, the ying and yang.
In the meantime, for those that use Launchbox and Antstream, PGM member Ed209 shared a cool link that an kindly soul named UKPenguins have assembled a massive list of direct links to most of the Antstream games here: https://forums.launchbox-app.com/files/file/4379-antstream-1065-url-shortcuts/ — Yes, it’s possible to link and launch directly into specific games on Antstream (something you probably won’t be able to do from the Xbox app, but is possible through Launchbox).
This makes it easier to bypass the Antstream UI, which is a bit cumbersome and sometimes counter-intuitive. Antstream did tease a new version of their user interface, so perhaps we’ll see that with this launch(?).