So Marvel MaXimum Collection is tough to review. In terms of price point and variation of games included, it’s solid. The collection includes six games with 13 variations spanning 8-bit systems (including handhelds), 1-bit systems, and the arcade. The collection also has features you’d expect for a retro re-release, like a music player, rewind, save states (which are sorely needed for some of the harder titles in the collection, like Silver Surfer), as well as a few display filters to make the games look a bit like they did when they were released.
They even have pictures of the box art for the various games, which is a neat addition. One of the cool things about box art and the feeling of physical media is how the items look as a complete package rather than flattened out like they’re about to be stored. A bit more effort could have been applied here, but I understand getting current high-resolution images of complete copies could have been a hurdle that was a lot more daunting than most of us realize.
With that said, no pictures of the arcade cabinets?! WHAT ON EARF. So many people have never seen the four-player version of the X-Men arcade cab, and I would bet that only a small percentage of that population has seen the six-player monster X-Men cabinet with two monitors — that feels like a miss, because THE reason to buy this collection is X-Men: The Arcade Game.
In terms of general features, I have to give the team at Limited Run Games (LRG) credit for including multiple versions of each game where appropriate. One of the interesting parts about gaming in the 80s and 90s was that there was a real difference between Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo, and you would see that play out when the same game was released on different consoles. You saw that to some extent with the Saturn and the PlayStation, but the differences you’d see for the same title when it was released on the SNES vs. the Genesis could be vast. That’s in stark contrast to today, where you pretty much have parity across consoles with much smaller differences. The differences back in the day are what fueled console wars.
So all this sounds good right? Maybe it’s because I grew up in the 80s and 90s, but it’s hard not to feel like a little bit more effort could have been put in here to provide some historical context around why these games were created, why they were important, and, frankly, why some of the games here are NOT great but deserve to be preserved anyway. From a purely technical preservation standpoint, Marvel MaXimum Collection hits the mark. From a contextual standpoint, I think it’s a bit off. Here’s why:
Video games (like movies and music) are a lens used to view the time in which they were created. That lens may be colored, cracked, warped, or scratched, but it is absolutely a lens we can look through, and I think it’s important to understand why the lens was made, why it has imperfections, why it’s colored a certain way, etc. Especially as we get further from the time of creation. Context is important.
There’s a lot of cultural context that’s missing around why these games were made. So I’ll provide a little bit of that context, which will probably get me in trouble with my editor, but all the other reviews I’ve seen (since this is being put out after embargo) for this collection are all lacking and feel like boilerplate stuff that was written with AI. You’d be better off reading the description provided by LRG, because the reviews don’t tell you anything. So I’m going to. We’ll get into a few details about the properties’ popularity at the time of their respective releases, a few interesting tidbits about what was going on with the characters, and whether or not the games hold up.
Strap in, true believers.
There’s no doubt the main draw of this collection is the X-Men: The Arcade Game, and out of every game here, it’s the one that holds up the best and is still the most fun. Konami was killing it with their beat-em ups in this era, with their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game coming out in ’89, The Simpsons arcade game releasing in 1991, and X-Men: The Arcade Game releasing in the spring of 1992. X-Men arcade has great graphics, big, colorful sprites, catchy music, and bombastic sound effects — everything you needed to attract people walking through arcades at the time. There were two variants of the game that hit arcades: a four-player cabinet with one monitor, and a six-player cabinet that was absolutely GINORMOUS and included two full-sized monitors to accommodate all the action. This thing was an absolute UNIT. And it’s a shame they don’t have pictures of it in the game’s archival data. So here are a few:
Pretty sure only Colossus could move that thing.
In terms of gameplay, for X-Men arcade, you can play by yourself, play with friends locally, or play with friends online, up to six players, truly replicating the chaos of the arcade when you have enough people. The game includes a stage select so you can play specific stages and beat the brakes off of various Sentinels, Hellfire Club guards, and Nights, and then bosses like Pyro, Blob, Wendigo, and Juggernaut on your way to fight Magneto, the Master of Magnet. Yes. I said Master of Magnet because, like many games at the time, there are translation errors in X-Men, and that’s one of them.
You can choose between Cyclops, Colossus, Nightcrawler, Storm, Dazzler and Wolverine. Each character can use their own specific abilities as a room clearing special move, so Cyclops hits people with his optic blasts, Storm throws around tornadoes and Wolverine uses his… laser claws?
Look, Konami’s developers obviously made some changes here to make special moves work for characters like Wolverine and Colossus, but even with changes like Wolverine shooting lasers out of his claws, the X-Men arcade game is an absolute banger of a beat-em-up. This game alone is worth the price of admission.
One of the things I always found funny when I played this game as a kid was people never wanted to pick Dazzler because they didn’t know who she was. Everybody always thought she was Jubilee, a character with basically the exact same power set but who looked entirely different.
X-Men: The Arcade Game came out in the spring of 1992, when the franchise was riding a wave of popularity, making it one of the hottest entertainment properties in the world. X-Men #1 had been released in October 1991, selling over 8.1 million copies, becoming the best-selling single-issue comic of all-time. That’s a record it still holds now in 2026. X-Men #1 basically capped off a 20-year run of X-Men by writer Chris Claremont that defined X-Men for the modern age. It cannot be overstated how much Claremont defined the X-Men as we know them, and how artist Jim Lee (who now runs DC Comics and is one of the founders of Image Comics) defined the X-Men’s look that’s still popular today. Fox Kids used his designs for its insanely popular animated X-Men series that debuted in October 1992. The same designs are still used in the X-Men ’97 cartoon, the Marvel vs Capcom games, on shirts, lunchboxes, etc.
The reason I give this context is that it cannot be overstated how popular the X-Men were in 1992 and how much more popular they’d become throughout the 90s. X-Men had basically taken over pop culture at that point. Why is this important? Because you’d think the team from Konami would choose the team from X-Men #1 and use those designs as the anchor for the X-Men arcade to capitalize on that success, but they didn’t. The look of X-Men: The Arcade Game and its cast of characters are based on a failed 1989 pilot for an X-Men cartoon. If anyone wants to see it now, you can find it on YouTube, just search for “Pryde of the X-Men.” It’s wild. Wolverine has an Australian accent, which is weird because Wolverine is Canadian, but it also feels prescient because over the last 20+ years Wolverine has been played by Hugh Jackman, an Australian, in the live-action X-Men movies.
As to why Konami made this decision, I can only speculate. I couldn’t find any documented public statements from Konami or its developers explaining the decision, so I can only speculate it was about timing and available resources. The failed X-Men cartoon pilot was called Pryde of the X-Men, and it was fully realized, so Konami had material for reference that wasn’t just comic books. I would assume that was why they were able to nail the look and feel of both TMNT and The Simpsons for their respective arcade games: the available animated material was relatively easy to translate into video games.
For reference, this is the team from X-Men #1 from 1991:
This is the team from the Konami X-Men game that came out in 1992:
X-Men: The Arcade Game is the only game in this collection that I would love to learn more about, and it’s the crown jewel of this collection based on the options available for it. It’s the only game with online play. It’s obvious this game is THE reason they made this collection, leaving the rest of the games in the package feeling like padding. Or, if we’re being generous, the other games are here to serve as historical milestones to show how terrible-to-average superhero games used to be. Games like Spider-Man from Insomniac and the Batman Arkham games by Rocksteady are the rare, great super hero games amongst a lot of super hero-based games that are simply not great.
Don’t even get me started on the super hero games from LJN from the 8-bit era. There’s a reason people used to say LJN stood for “Let’s Just Not”.
Speaking of Let’s Just Not, Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade’s Revenge. Not a great game. However, it’s the only title in this collection where the X-Men and Spider-Man are in the same game, and in theory, should be good. It’s not based on any specific comic run that I’m familiar with, and unlike the majority of the titles in this collection, X-Men/Spider-Man is a platformer and not a beat-em-up. There are three versions of the game: SNES, Genesis, and portable versions for the Game Boy and Game Gear.
The variety in the gameplay comes from each character having their own move set and levels, so there’s variety inherent in the game’s design. The problem is the game is ridiculously hard and unfair. The rewind feature and save states help mitigate this problem but it doesn’t make the game anymore enjoyable. This is an interesting game to revisit, but you’ll probably only play it once.
Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage, as well as Separation Anxiety, are both sub-par beat-em-ups, coated by the popularity of the stories they’re based on. Spider-Man was in a weird place in the 90s. Venom, one of his most recognizable villains, was being set up to become an anti-hero, and Marvel was trying to figure out how to capitalize on that split popularity while not losing what made people like Venom as a villain. Enter Carnage, created by David Michelinie (the Spider-Man writer who helped create Venom with artist Todd McFarlane) and artist Mark Bagley (Atlanta, represent!). Carnage was designed to be a villain that could be much darker and more psychotic, and take the monster role that Venom used to occupy in the Spider-Man mythos. His introduction, combined with Venom’s popularity, led to a 14-part crossover, Maximum Carnage, which ran from May to August of 1993 and served as the basis for this subpar brawler.
Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage has some cool things about it, but it’s not enough to make it memorable or worth playing more than once. The graphics are not great, enemy sprites repeat at an alarming rate, and mechanically, the game does not hold up. It’s repetitive, and the CPU has invincibility frames and will cheap you out when it can. It’s also not co-op, which feels ridiculous in a game with Spider-Man and Venom–instead, you can only switch between the two.
Separation Anxiety is the next game featured in this collection and is a direct sequel to Maximum Carnage. Rather than being based on a comic book storyline, it’s a mishmash of plots from the Venom: Seperation Anxiety mini-series from 1994 and the Venom: Lethal Protector mini-series. The gameplay is pretty much the same as Maximum Carnage, but with a much bigger focus on Venom (gotta capitalize on his popularity!), co-op, and a stronger focus on story than Maximum Carnage. There are even some cool cameos from other heroes that I won’t spoil.
There have been a lot of Spider-Man games made over the years, and I would have loved to see a few of them included in this collection, even if it was only the games from the early 90s. For example, Sega made Spider-Man: The Video Game, an arcade beat-em-up released in 1991 on the Sega System 32 arcade hardware. It’s a lot of fun and it was never released or ported to any home consoles. I’d love to see this one come to a future collection because it’s a great game.
I also have a soft spot for the Sega Genesis and Sega CD Spider-Man games, both named Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin. The Sega CD version is not a port of the Genesis version — it has some differences. It has CD audio (as did most CD games at the time, gotta sell that new format!), extra levels and bosses, and it was less linear than the original game. So you could think of it as a director’s cut of the Genesis title. The Sega CD version also has a hilarious theme song that’s worth looking for on YouTube.
Captain American and the Avengers comes in three varieties: the arcade version (which does not have online play like the X-Men arcade game), the Genesis version, and the NES version. The Arcade version is a beat-em-up that has no real basis in any storyline but takes a basic scenario you’d see in arcade games at the time: bad guy does something bad, good guys chase him across the world, and fight various villains along the way. If anything, the game emulates the Bronze Age style of The Avengers at the time, so it feels true to the comics while not referencing a specific story.
It still looks great and it sounds great, too, but the gameplay has not aged well if you’re playing it by yourself. The basic impact you feel in other beat-em-ups from the time is not present here. Your characters do not hit fast enough, so the normal cadence of a beat-em-up, where you get 3-5 hit combos on enemies, can regularly be interrupted after your first hit. The only real way to get around this is to hold forward while attacking. It doesn’t feel great, and that sucks because Captain America and The Avengers have a lot going for it. The gameplay is more varied than just hitting a boss until they have an invincibility frame and smack you back, so it doesn’t subscribe to the Konami beat-em-up style for the most part. There are on-rail shooter sections in each level, and the game still looks pretty good with cool comic book touches like graphical sound effects displayed when things blow up. Various sound effects being written out make the game feel like you’re playing a moving comic book. There’s also an absolutely insane amount of villains in it across the game’s five levels, and since this game also has translation errors, there is some hilarious dialogue. Every boss fight has a bit of dialogue before you throw down and when you face off against Ultron, the Avengers ask him where the macguffin you’re chasing is, and he responds with “ASK THE POLICE.” That dialogue alone justifies Captain America and The Avengers‘ inclusion in this collection. The only change I wish they had made is letting you switch your characters after you die. Maybe there’s a way to do it, but my friends and I who were playing couldn’t figure it out.
The Genesis version is just like the arcade game but less colorful and with less animation, it also sounds worse but plays pretty well. The 8-bit version is an NES title where you play Captain America and Hawkeye in a sidescrolling adventure with bosses that take FOREVER to defeat.
What the package includes that I didn’t expect is Silver Surfer. Silver Surfer is an interesting game to include because it’s unlike any other game in the collection. It’s an 8-bit NES sidescrolling and overhead shooter. Not based on any specific storyline, either. On paper, Silver Surfer as a shooter is a GREAT idea, and because It came out late in the NES’s life, it borrows ideas from other games and mixes them together to produce something relatively unique. It has a password system and is relatively non-linear, but, like so many titles in the 8-bit era, its execution is spotty due to its difficulty. And by difficulty, I mean the game is ridiculously hard because you die from one hit. And it’s not just enemy projectiles, no, if you hit things in the stage, you will die. The stages have tons of things happening at once, lots of enemies, environmental hazards, and enemy projectiles all converging on you, and because it’s an 8-bit title, there isn’t a lot of definition about what is and isn’t dangerous to you, so deaths happen frequently. More often than not, you end up dying to things that you feel shouldn’t kill you, or that come as a complete surprise. It’s frustrating. The rewind option mitigates some of this feeling, but not enough.
The soundtrack, however, is a banger.
This is another game where I would have loved to understand how this came together. Did they get the license cheap and work backward from there to design the game? Was this a case where the developer had a shoestring budget, a small team, and little time to churn something out? Silver Surfer feels like it could have been one of the 8-bit greats with a few tweaks, so I applaud its inclusion here if only to get more people exposed to it. I suspect that one of the reasons it was included with the collection was because the Silver Surfer recently appeared in the recent Fantastic Four movie, and I doubt the licensing around this game was difficult to navigate. Out of all of the titles in the collection, it’s the one that’s the most interesting because Silver Surfer doesn’t hold specific cultural cache the way Spider-Man or the X-Men do, and the bones of a great game are here.
So I’ve written a lot, because the Marvel MaXimum Collection feels like it exists for two reasons. The first is preservation. On that, it would absolutely get a 5/5. From a title selection standpoint and feature standpoint, it feels like there’s a lot more that could have been done here. Adding the Spider-Man titles from Sega would have been great to see. Same with the X-Men titles that were on Genesis. More features about the games and extra options for cheats and online play for all the co-op games feel like another big miss here. So, from a features perspective, this feels like a 2/5. X-Men is the only game that really got any love here, and it feels like LRG only added these other titles to pad out the collection.
At the end of the day, I do think Marvel Maximum Collection is worth your money, but you should know the only truly great title in here is the X-Men arcade game. If you’re okay with that–with the rest of the titles being mid–and with the addition features feeling barebones, then throw down the cash. If you expected more, then wait for a sale.
So Marvel MaXimum Collection is tough to review. In terms of price point and variation of games included, it’s solid. The collection includes six games with 13 variations spanning 8-bit systems (including handhelds), 1-bit systems, and the arcade. The collection…
So Marvel MaXimum Collection is tough to review. In terms of price point and variation of games included, it’s solid. The collection includes six games with 13 variations spanning 8-bit systems (including handhelds), 1-bit systems, and the arcade. The collection also has features you’d expect for a retro re-release, like a music player, rewind, save states (which are sorely needed for some of the harder titles in the collection, like Silver Surfer), as well as a few display filters to make the games look a bit like they did when they were released.
They even have pictures of the box art for the various games, which is a neat addition. One of the cool things about box art and the feeling of physical media is how the items look as a complete package rather than flattened out like they’re about to be stored. A bit more effort could have been applied here, but I understand getting current high-resolution images of complete copies could have been a hurdle that was a lot more daunting than most of us realize.
With that said, no pictures of the arcade cabinets?! WHAT ON EARF. So many people have never seen the four-player version of the X-Men arcade cab, and I would bet that only a small percentage of that population has seen the six-player monster X-Men cabinet with two monitors — that feels like a miss, because THE reason to buy this collection is X-Men: The Arcade Game.
In terms of general features, I have to give the team at Limited Run Games (LRG) credit for including multiple versions of each game where appropriate. One of the interesting parts about gaming in the 80s and 90s was that there was a real difference between Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo, and you would see that play out when the same game was released on different consoles. You saw that to some extent with the Saturn and the PlayStation, but the differences you’d see for the same title when it was released on the SNES vs. the Genesis could be vast. That’s in stark contrast to today, where you pretty much have parity across consoles with much smaller differences. The differences back in the day are what fueled console wars.
So all this sounds good right? Maybe it’s because I grew up in the 80s and 90s, but it’s hard not to feel like a little bit more effort could have been put in here to provide some historical context around why these games were created, why they were important, and, frankly, why some of the games here are NOT great but deserve to be preserved anyway. From a purely technical preservation standpoint, Marvel MaXimum Collection hits the mark. From a contextual standpoint, I think it’s a bit off. Here’s why:
Video games (like movies and music) are a lens used to view the time in which they were created. That lens may be colored, cracked, warped, or scratched, but it is absolutely a lens we can look through, and I think it’s important to understand why the lens was made, why it has imperfections, why it’s colored a certain way, etc. Especially as we get further from the time of creation. Context is important.
There’s a lot of cultural context that’s missing around why these games were made. So I’ll provide a little bit of that context, which will probably get me in trouble with my editor, but all the other reviews I’ve seen (since this is being put out after embargo) for this collection are all lacking and feel like boilerplate stuff that was written with AI. You’d be better off reading the description provided by LRG, because the reviews don’t tell you anything. So I’m going to. We’ll get into a few details about the properties’ popularity at the time of their respective releases, a few interesting tidbits about what was going on with the characters, and whether or not the games hold up.
Strap in, true believers.
There’s no doubt the main draw of this collection is the X-Men: The Arcade Game, and out of every game here, it’s the one that holds up the best and is still the most fun. Konami was killing it with their beat-em ups in this era, with their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game coming out in ’89, The Simpsons arcade game releasing in 1991, and X-Men: The Arcade Game releasing in the spring of 1992. X-Men arcade has great graphics, big, colorful sprites, catchy music, and bombastic sound effects — everything you needed to attract people walking through arcades at the time. There were two variants of the game that hit arcades: a four-player cabinet with one monitor, and a six-player cabinet that was absolutely GINORMOUS and included two full-sized monitors to accommodate all the action. This thing was an absolute UNIT. And it’s a shame they don’t have pictures of it in the game’s archival data. So here are a few:
Pretty sure only Colossus could move that thing.
In terms of gameplay, for X-Men arcade, you can play by yourself, play with friends locally, or play with friends online, up to six players, truly replicating the chaos of the arcade when you have enough people. The game includes a stage select so you can play specific stages and beat the brakes off of various Sentinels, Hellfire Club guards, and Nights, and then bosses like Pyro, Blob, Wendigo, and Juggernaut on your way to fight Magneto, the Master of Magnet. Yes. I said Master of Magnet because, like many games at the time, there are translation errors in X-Men, and that’s one of them.
You can choose between Cyclops, Colossus, Nightcrawler, Storm, Dazzler and Wolverine. Each character can use their own specific abilities as a room clearing special move, so Cyclops hits people with his optic blasts, Storm throws around tornadoes and Wolverine uses his… laser claws?
Look, Konami’s developers obviously made some changes here to make special moves work for characters like Wolverine and Colossus, but even with changes like Wolverine shooting lasers out of his claws, the X-Men arcade game is an absolute banger of a beat-em-up. This game alone is worth the price of admission.
One of the things I always found funny when I played this game as a kid was people never wanted to pick Dazzler because they didn’t know who she was. Everybody always thought she was Jubilee, a character with basically the exact same power set but who looked entirely different.
X-Men: The Arcade Game came out in the spring of 1992, when the franchise was riding a wave of popularity, making it one of the hottest entertainment properties in the world. X-Men #1 had been released in October 1991, selling over 8.1 million copies, becoming the best-selling single-issue comic of all-time. That’s a record it still holds now in 2026. X-Men #1 basically capped off a 20-year run of X-Men by writer Chris Claremont that defined X-Men for the modern age. It cannot be overstated how much Claremont defined the X-Men as we know them, and how artist Jim Lee (who now runs DC Comics and is one of the founders of Image Comics) defined the X-Men’s look that’s still popular today. Fox Kids used his designs for its insanely popular animated X-Men series that debuted in October 1992. The same designs are still used in the X-Men ’97 cartoon, the Marvel vs Capcom games, on shirts, lunchboxes, etc.
The reason I give this context is that it cannot be overstated how popular the X-Men were in 1992 and how much more popular they’d become throughout the 90s. X-Men had basically taken over pop culture at that point. Why is this important? Because you’d think the team from Konami would choose the team from X-Men #1 and use those designs as the anchor for the X-Men arcade to capitalize on that success, but they didn’t. The look of X-Men: The Arcade Game and its cast of characters are based on a failed 1989 pilot for an X-Men cartoon. If anyone wants to see it now, you can find it on YouTube, just search for “Pryde of the X-Men.” It’s wild. Wolverine has an Australian accent, which is weird because Wolverine is Canadian, but it also feels prescient because over the last 20+ years Wolverine has been played by Hugh Jackman, an Australian, in the live-action X-Men movies.
As to why Konami made this decision, I can only speculate. I couldn’t find any documented public statements from Konami or its developers explaining the decision, so I can only speculate it was about timing and available resources. The failed X-Men cartoon pilot was called Pryde of the X-Men, and it was fully realized, so Konami had material for reference that wasn’t just comic books. I would assume that was why they were able to nail the look and feel of both TMNT and The Simpsons for their respective arcade games: the available animated material was relatively easy to translate into video games.
For reference, this is the team from X-Men #1 from 1991:
This is the team from the Konami X-Men game that came out in 1992:
X-Men: The Arcade Game is the only game in this collection that I would love to learn more about, and it’s the crown jewel of this collection based on the options available for it. It’s the only game with online play. It’s obvious this game is THE reason they made this collection, leaving the rest of the games in the package feeling like padding. Or, if we’re being generous, the other games are here to serve as historical milestones to show how terrible-to-average superhero games used to be. Games like Spider-Man from Insomniac and the Batman Arkham games by Rocksteady are the rare, great super hero games amongst a lot of super hero-based games that are simply not great.
Don’t even get me started on the super hero games from LJN from the 8-bit era. There’s a reason people used to say LJN stood for “Let’s Just Not”.
Speaking of Let’s Just Not, Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade’s Revenge. Not a great game. However, it’s the only title in this collection where the X-Men and Spider-Man are in the same game, and in theory, should be good. It’s not based on any specific comic run that I’m familiar with, and unlike the majority of the titles in this collection, X-Men/Spider-Man is a platformer and not a beat-em-up. There are three versions of the game: SNES, Genesis, and portable versions for the Game Boy and Game Gear.
The variety in the gameplay comes from each character having their own move set and levels, so there’s variety inherent in the game’s design. The problem is the game is ridiculously hard and unfair. The rewind feature and save states help mitigate this problem but it doesn’t make the game anymore enjoyable. This is an interesting game to revisit, but you’ll probably only play it once.
Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage, as well as Separation Anxiety, are both sub-par beat-em-ups, coated by the popularity of the stories they’re based on. Spider-Man was in a weird place in the 90s. Venom, one of his most recognizable villains, was being set up to become an anti-hero, and Marvel was trying to figure out how to capitalize on that split popularity while not losing what made people like Venom as a villain. Enter Carnage, created by David Michelinie (the Spider-Man writer who helped create Venom with artist Todd McFarlane) and artist Mark Bagley (Atlanta, represent!). Carnage was designed to be a villain that could be much darker and more psychotic, and take the monster role that Venom used to occupy in the Spider-Man mythos. His introduction, combined with Venom’s popularity, led to a 14-part crossover, Maximum Carnage, which ran from May to August of 1993 and served as the basis for this subpar brawler.
Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage has some cool things about it, but it’s not enough to make it memorable or worth playing more than once. The graphics are not great, enemy sprites repeat at an alarming rate, and mechanically, the game does not hold up. It’s repetitive, and the CPU has invincibility frames and will cheap you out when it can. It’s also not co-op, which feels ridiculous in a game with Spider-Man and Venom–instead, you can only switch between the two.
Separation Anxiety is the next game featured in this collection and is a direct sequel to Maximum Carnage. Rather than being based on a comic book storyline, it’s a mishmash of plots from the Venom: Seperation Anxiety mini-series from 1994 and the Venom: Lethal Protector mini-series. The gameplay is pretty much the same as Maximum Carnage, but with a much bigger focus on Venom (gotta capitalize on his popularity!), co-op, and a stronger focus on story than Maximum Carnage. There are even some cool cameos from other heroes that I won’t spoil.
There have been a lot of Spider-Man games made over the years, and I would have loved to see a few of them included in this collection, even if it was only the games from the early 90s. For example, Sega made Spider-Man: The Video Game, an arcade beat-em-up released in 1991 on the Sega System 32 arcade hardware. It’s a lot of fun and it was never released or ported to any home consoles. I’d love to see this one come to a future collection because it’s a great game.
I also have a soft spot for the Sega Genesis and Sega CD Spider-Man games, both named Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin. The Sega CD version is not a port of the Genesis version — it has some differences. It has CD audio (as did most CD games at the time, gotta sell that new format!), extra levels and bosses, and it was less linear than the original game. So you could think of it as a director’s cut of the Genesis title. The Sega CD version also has a hilarious theme song that’s worth looking for on YouTube.
Captain American and the Avengers comes in three varieties: the arcade version (which does not have online play like the X-Men arcade game), the Genesis version, and the NES version. The Arcade version is a beat-em-up that has no real basis in any storyline but takes a basic scenario you’d see in arcade games at the time: bad guy does something bad, good guys chase him across the world, and fight various villains along the way. If anything, the game emulates the Bronze Age style of The Avengers at the time, so it feels true to the comics while not referencing a specific story.
It still looks great and it sounds great, too, but the gameplay has not aged well if you’re playing it by yourself. The basic impact you feel in other beat-em-ups from the time is not present here. Your characters do not hit fast enough, so the normal cadence of a beat-em-up, where you get 3-5 hit combos on enemies, can regularly be interrupted after your first hit. The only real way to get around this is to hold forward while attacking. It doesn’t feel great, and that sucks because Captain America and The Avengers have a lot going for it. The gameplay is more varied than just hitting a boss until they have an invincibility frame and smack you back, so it doesn’t subscribe to the Konami beat-em-up style for the most part. There are on-rail shooter sections in each level, and the game still looks pretty good with cool comic book touches like graphical sound effects displayed when things blow up. Various sound effects being written out make the game feel like you’re playing a moving comic book. There’s also an absolutely insane amount of villains in it across the game’s five levels, and since this game also has translation errors, there is some hilarious dialogue. Every boss fight has a bit of dialogue before you throw down and when you face off against Ultron, the Avengers ask him where the macguffin you’re chasing is, and he responds with “ASK THE POLICE.” That dialogue alone justifies Captain America and The Avengers‘ inclusion in this collection. The only change I wish they had made is letting you switch your characters after you die. Maybe there’s a way to do it, but my friends and I who were playing couldn’t figure it out.
The Genesis version is just like the arcade game but less colorful and with less animation, it also sounds worse but plays pretty well. The 8-bit version is an NES title where you play Captain America and Hawkeye in a sidescrolling adventure with bosses that take FOREVER to defeat.
What the package includes that I didn’t expect is Silver Surfer. Silver Surfer is an interesting game to include because it’s unlike any other game in the collection. It’s an 8-bit NES sidescrolling and overhead shooter. Not based on any specific storyline, either. On paper, Silver Surfer as a shooter is a GREAT idea, and because It came out late in the NES’s life, it borrows ideas from other games and mixes them together to produce something relatively unique. It has a password system and is relatively non-linear, but, like so many titles in the 8-bit era, its execution is spotty due to its difficulty. And by difficulty, I mean the game is ridiculously hard because you die from one hit. And it’s not just enemy projectiles, no, if you hit things in the stage, you will die. The stages have tons of things happening at once, lots of enemies, environmental hazards, and enemy projectiles all converging on you, and because it’s an 8-bit title, there isn’t a lot of definition about what is and isn’t dangerous to you, so deaths happen frequently. More often than not, you end up dying to things that you feel shouldn’t kill you, or that come as a complete surprise. It’s frustrating. The rewind option mitigates some of this feeling, but not enough.
The soundtrack, however, is a banger.
This is another game where I would have loved to understand how this came together. Did they get the license cheap and work backward from there to design the game? Was this a case where the developer had a shoestring budget, a small team, and little time to churn something out? Silver Surfer feels like it could have been one of the 8-bit greats with a few tweaks, so I applaud its inclusion here if only to get more people exposed to it. I suspect that one of the reasons it was included with the collection was because the Silver Surfer recently appeared in the recent Fantastic Four movie, and I doubt the licensing around this game was difficult to navigate. Out of all of the titles in the collection, it’s the one that’s the most interesting because Silver Surfer doesn’t hold specific cultural cache the way Spider-Man or the X-Men do, and the bones of a great game are here.
So I’ve written a lot, because the Marvel MaXimum Collection feels like it exists for two reasons. The first is preservation. On that, it would absolutely get a 5/5. From a title selection standpoint and feature standpoint, it feels like there’s a lot more that could have been done here. Adding the Spider-Man titles from Sega would have been great to see. Same with the X-Men titles that were on Genesis. More features about the games and extra options for cheats and online play for all the co-op games feel like another big miss here. So, from a features perspective, this feels like a 2/5. X-Men is the only game that really got any love here, and it feels like LRG only added these other titles to pad out the collection.
At the end of the day, I do think Marvel Maximum Collection is worth your money, but you should know the only truly great title in here is the X-Men arcade game. If you’re okay with that–with the rest of the titles being mid–and with the addition features feeling barebones, then throw down the cash. If you expected more, then wait for a sale.
by Leigh Lamb
