So Microsoft has a new Retro Classics thing for Xbox/PC...

[A Black Falcon]

And unfortunately it's kind of a disaster.

So, on the positive side, Microsoft decided to add a new bonus for everyone subscribing to any tier of Game Pass for Xbox or PC, including the core tier that used to be Xbox Live Gold.  Given that the free games to keep (Games with Gold) went away and all you get now are a rotating set of titles you get access to through Game Pass, adding a new thing for subscribers is great.  Also, I love retro games of course as well as modern ones so this should be great.

The collection currently includes 63 games, all of them Sierra or Activision-connected classics mostly for the Atari 2600 or computers.  Yeah, Microsoft games aren't included, not yet, even though they did release a bunch of PC games in the '90s.  The most interesting lnclusions are MechWarrior 1 for SNES and MechWarrior 2 for PS1, the only games here for those consoles, because it suggests that Microsoft has gotten the mech rights for classic MechWarrior again and that's a fantastic sign!  Of course MechWarrior 2 for PC is the great all-time classic, not the PS1/Saturn version, but still that it was put here is great.  MW2 for PC is the best game developed by Activision.  The rest of the library are, as mentioned, a bunch of Activision games for the Atari 2600 and a bunch of Sierra adventure games (plus Caesar II) for the PC or Amiga.  It includes a lot of games I love -- Quest for Glory 1, Megamania, Enduro, Caesar II, and more.

Plus, Challenges have been added, which are pretty cool.  These give you some specific challenge within the game for a high score competition, and the collection has an online high score table.  One example is an Enduro challenge where you go maximum speed all the time and have to see how far you can get.  It's hard but fun.

That all sounds good, it's a good selection of classic games, right?  So, why is it a disaster?  And it very much is a disaster, to the point of being kind of unplayable...

Because it's not a local collection.  It's all streamed via a partnership with Antstream Arcade, a UK-based streamed retro games service.  Yes, in order to play Atari 2600 games on your Xbox Series X, you ... need to stream them over the internet, with regular connection problems interrupting play.  Yeah, games do NOT play entirely smoothly, not even close.  That's just ludicrous!  I kind of understand streaming the more complex PC games because emulating them would take a little effort, though it's surely doable with dramatically better performance than you get from the barely playable state of streamed Caesar II on XSX as it is (the audio is awful, the controls extremely hard to use on gamepad due to awful stick sensitivity...), but ATARI 2600 GAMES need to be streamed?  And the streaming performance isn't even all that good?  That is just unacceptable.

For example, in my high score book from whenever I last played the game years back, it says my best score in Megamania is 101,000.  I doubt I'd get that score now on real hardware though I should try to see, but I can sure say that it'd be a lot better than the like 10,000 best score I've managed on the streamed version here.  There's so much chopping and hitching, it's beyond unacceptable.

So uh, nice try Microsoft but this must be rethought as something playable locally and not streamed.  There is a reason why streamed services haven't caught on and this is one example of why.

[A Black Falcon]

I turned on my 7800 (playing Megamania for 2600) for the first time in quite a while and while I'm very rusty at the game and didn't get anywhere near 100,000 points, I did beat my best score from the XSX streamed version in three tries.  After playing for a while my best so far is just under 25,000, or at least 10k points over my best in the streamed version.  It's a lot easier to play a game when it isn't constantly chopping and stuttering!

Also, probably due to its British origins in Antstream Arcade, the Retro Classics program is in British English.  'Favourite' is not what it should say in the thing here in the US...

[Dark Jaguar]

At least with Nintendo's solution, hacking makes it permanent... even if it's a little... sailing the seas.

But with MS's, piracy isn't even an option.

[A Black Falcon]

Well, all the games in this thing are ones you absolutely can find 'backup' copies of online, but yes streaming is a way to make preservation impossible, that is certainly true.

But even if that happened, if streamed games run like THIS not much would be lost on a gameplay front...