The Xbox brand has been around for over two decades and Microsoft has leveraged it in several ways over the years – from re-releases to Game Pass Ultimate unlocking some of the back catalog – but a new method of gaming has come to the Xbox family with the Retro Classics app for Game Pass users. Microsoft has worked with Antstream Arcade to bring a slew of Activision classics to the Xbox platform via streaming, which has the benefit of allowing players to enjoy these games in a way that doesn’t require native ports, but also allows them to load easily because they’re such small games.
Classics Reborn
The Activision focus on the app lowers the amount of available games compared to the similarly laid-out Antstream Arcade app, but this one also doesn’t operate on any kind of credits system and everything is completely free to play as much as you want. I found Grand Prix to be a fun time as was Freeway, which has an interesting setup to it. You’re basically playing a game of Frogger, but as two chickens on opposite sides of the road. The goal isn’t just to avoid getting hit, but to last two minutes and tally up as many finishes across the road as possible, especially as a pair at the same time.
The Activision focus on the app lowers the amount of available games compared to the similarly laid-out Antstream Arcade app.
Grand Prix
The app itself offers up more modern-looking box art for some games – including Enduro, which has me wishing there were modern remakes of them in these redone art styles. The app also has issues with games loading properly on the console itself, which I didn’t have when going for an in-browser streaming experience on PC. It could be that the servers are getting hit hard now, but that’s an issue when it’s an entirely streaming-based service and one using older games that don’t take up much bandwidth to even load up. The Anstream Arcade app isn’t having issues, so it would seem to be due to the Retro Classics app having problems, which is disappointing.
The in-game selection is set to get better over time, which is good as it’s largely very early ’80s and late ’70s-centric with a couple of ’90s games sprinkled in. It feels odd to have two streaming-only apps devoted to classic games, especially with this one just being branded as Retro Classics and not Xbox Retro Classics as its logo implies. Logically, just having this as part of the Anstream Arcade app would make more sense given that they’ve created the menus for it and it feels like an extension of that app more than anything else, but having it separate for Game Pass users makes sense to keep it as its own app. As with Antstream, the challenges provide an incentive to try out games I otherwise wouldn’t.
Anstream Arcade Adds MSX Classics to Streaming Library
