Antstream Arcade might be worth your quarters

destructoid.com:

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.

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.