System 3 vs. Antstream

System failure

There’s been some questions over the recent reveal for the last two carts coming to Evercade this year, in particular the Last Ninja and IK collection. Owners of all the games appearing on this two collections (yes, the James Pond one too) are System 3, and they’ve come into some criticism over this news. From the outside looking in, the release of the Evercade carts looks like an abandonment to some, because System 3 has been promising a release on a Last Ninja Collection on Xbox and Playstation as part of a Kickstarter campaign, but so far only a Switch release has happened. To so it seems like System 3 has forgotten about the promises they made to Playstation and Xbox fans. Not so says System 3. Writing on the page for their Kickstarter campaign, System 3 boss Mark Cale has laid the blame squarely on developers Antsteam. According to Cale, Antstream failed to deliver on the commitments of contract between System 3 and them, with suggestions that Antstream misled System 3, and is even today holding up development since they have refused to hand of source code for the development they have done. All of this changes has meant that System 3 need ed something to replace the money they were expecting to make with this partnership with Antsteam, so they turned to Blaze. The Evercade release has given System 3 some needed finacial breathing space, and Blaze are apparently working with System 3 to help in some small way with emulation.

How much of what Mr. Cale said is true we can’t say yet, we’re only getting one side after all, but if what he says is true, then this whole affair doesn’t reflect well on Antstream.

Playing videogames, writing about videogames, considering videogames—that about sums it up. Videogames are the one hobby that I’ve kept since I was only little, zapping ducks on the NES or knocking out MR. X. And when I’m not enjoying classics from the bit generation of games or checking out those earliest of polygons, I’m probably playing something from today’s age of modern gaming: if I’m not complaining about it. Something I’m doing at the moment? Playing dome of the survival horror games in my GOG and Steam libraries.